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 113 of 182 · 20 per page

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  In September of grade twelve, the matric dance was coming up. Senior prom. This was the big one. I was again faced with the dilemma of Valentine’s Day, confronting another strange ritual I did not understand. All I knew about prom was that, according to my American movies, prom is where it happens. You lose your virginity. You go and you ride in the limousine, and then you and the girl do the thing. That was literally my only reference. But I knew the rule: Cool guys get girls, and funny guys get to hang out with the cool guys with their girls. So I’d assumed I wouldn’t be going, or if I did go it wouldn’t be with a date. I had two middlemen working for me in my CD business, Bongani and Tom. They sold the CDs that I copied in exchange for a cut. I met Tom at the arcade at the Balfour Park mall. Like Teddy, he lived nearby because his mom was a domestic worker. Tom was in my grade but went to a government school, Northview, a proper ghetto school. Tom handled my CD sales over there. Tom was a chatterbox, hyperactive and go-go-go. He was a real hustler, too, always trying to cut a deal, work an angle. He could get people to do anything. A great guy, but fucking crazy and a complete liar as well. I went with him once to Hammanskraal, a settlement that was like a homeland, but not really. Hammanskraal, as its Afrikaans name suggests, was the kraal of Hamman, what used to be a white man’s farm. The proper homelands, Venda and Gazankulu and Transkei, were places where black people actually lived, and the government drew a border around them and said, “Stay there.” Hammanskraal and settlements like it were empty places on the map where deported black people had been relocated. That’s what the government did. They would find some patch of arid, dusty, useless land, and dig row after row of holes in the ground—a thousand latrines to serve four thousand families. Then they’d forcibly remove people from illegally occupying some white area and drop them off in the middle of nowhere with some pallets of plywood and corrugated iron. “Here. This is your new home. Build some houses. Good luck.” We’d watch it on the news. It was like some heartless, survival-based reality TV show, only nobody won any money. One afternoon in Hammanskraal, Tom told me we were going to see a talent show. At the time, I had a pair of Timberland boots I’d bought. They were the only decent piece of clothing I owned. Back then, almost no one in South Africa had Timberlands. They were impossible to get, but everyone wanted them because American rappers wore them. I’d scrimped and saved my tuck-shop money and my CD money to buy them. As we were leaving, Tom told me, “Be sure to wear your Timberlands.”

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  At the time I had no clue about clothes. My idea of fashion was a brand of clothing called Powerhouse. It was the kind of stuff weight lifters wear down in Miami or out at Venice Beach, baggy track pants with baggy sweatshirts. The logo was a cartoon of this giant bodybuilding bulldog wearing wraparound sunglasses and smoking a cigar and flexing his muscles. On the pants he was flexing all the way down your leg. On the shirt he was flexing across your chest. On the underwear, he was flexing on your crotch. I thought Powerhouse was the baddest thing in the world, I can’t even front. I had no friends, I loved dogs, and muscles were cool—that’s where I was working from. I had Powerhouse everything, the full range, five of the same outfit in five different colors. It was easy. The pants came with the top, so I knew how to make it work. Bongani, the other middleman from my CD business, found out I had a date, and he made it his mission to give me a makeover. “You need to up your game,” he said. “You cannot go to the dance looking the way you look—for her sake, not yours. Let’s go shopping.” I went to my mom and begged her to give me money to buy something to wear for the dance. She finally relented and gave me 2,000 rand, for one outfit. It was the most money she’d ever given me for anything in my life. I told Bongani how much I had to spend, and he said we’d make it work. The trick to looking rich, he told me, is to have one expensive item, and for the rest of the things you get basic, good-looking quality stuff. The nice item will draw everyone’s eye, and it’ll look like you’ve spent more than you have. In my mind nothing was cooler than the leather coats everybody wore in The Matrix. The Matrix came out while I was in high school and it was my favorite movie at the time. I loved Neo. In my heart I knew: I am Neo. He’s a nerd. He’s useless at everything, but secretly he’s a badass superhero. All I needed was a bald, mysterious black man to come into my life and show me the way. Now I had Bongani, black, head shaved, telling me, “You can do it. You’re the one.” And I was like, “Yes. I knew it.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  When she realized it was me she tried to break away but I had her tight and I began kissing her passionately and at the same time backing her up toward the couch near the window. She mumbled something about the door being open but I wasn’t taking any chance on letting her slip out of my arms. So I made a slight detour and little by little I edged her toward the door and made her shove it to with her ass. I locked it with my one free hand and then I moved her into the center of the room and with the free hand I unbuttoned my fly and got my pecker out and into position. She was so drugged with sleep that it was almost like working on an automaton. I could see too that she was enjoying the idea of being fucked half asleep. The only thing was that every time I made a lunge she grew more wide-awake. And as she grew more conscious she became more frightened. It was difficult to know how to put her to sleep again without losing a good fuck. I managed to tumble her on to the couch without losing ground and she was hot as hell now, twisting and squirming like an eel. From the time I had started to maul her I don’t think she had opened her eyes once. I kept saying to myself—“an Egyptian fuck . . . an Egyptian fuck”—and so as not to shoot off immediately I deliberately began thinking about the corpse that Monica had dragged to the Grand Central Station and about the thirty-five cents that I had left with Pauline on the highway. Then bango! A loud knock on the door and with that she opens her eyes wide and looks at me in utmost terror. I started to pull away quickly but to my surprise she held me tight “Don’t move,” she whispered in my ear. “Wait!” There was another loud knock and then I heard Kronski’s voice saying “It’s me, Thelma . . . it’s me, Izzy.” At that I almost burst out laughing. We slumped back again into a natural position and as her eyes softly closed I moved it around inside her, gently, so as not to wake her up again. It was one of the most wonderful fucks I ever had in my life. I thought it was going to last forever. Whenever I felt in danger of going off I would stop moving and think—think for example of where I would like to spend my vacation, if I got one, or think of the shirts lying in the bureau drawer, or the patch in the bedroom carpet just at the foot of the bed. Kronksi was still standing at the door—I could hear him changing about from one position to another.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  In between “The Midnight Fire Alarm” and “Marche Militaire” I would get my inspiration, which was to destroy all the existent forms of harmony and create my own cacophony. Imagine Uranus well aspected to Mars, to Mercury, to the Moon, to Jupiter, to Venus. It’s hard to imagine because Uranus functions best when it is badly aspected, when it is “afflicted,” so to speak. Yet that music which I gave off Sunday mornings, a music of well-being and of well-nourished desperation, was born of an illogically well-aspected Uranus firmly anchored in the Seventh House. I didn’t know it then, I didn’t know that Uranus existed, and lucky it was that I was ignorant. But I can see it now, because it was a fluky joy, a phony well-being, a destructive sort of fiery creation. The greater my euphoria the more tranquil the folks became. Even my sister who was dippy became calm and composed. The neighbors used to stand outside the window and listen, and now and then I would hear a burst of applause, and then bang, zip! like a rocket I was off again—Velocity Exercise No. 947½. If I happened to espy a cockroach crawling up the wall I was in bliss: that would lead me without the slightest modulation to Opus Izzit of my sadly corrugated clavichord. One Sunday, just like that, I composed one of the loveliest scherzos imaginable—to a louse. It was spring and we were all getting the sulphur treatment; I had been poring all week over Dante’s Inferno in English. Sunday came like a thaw, the birds driven so crazy by the sudden heat that they flew in and out of the window, immune to the music. One of the German relatives had just arrived from Hamburg, or Bremen, a maiden aunt who looked like a bull-dyker. Just to be near her was sufficient to throw me into a fit of rage. She used to pat me on the head and tell me I would be another Mozart. I hated Mozart, and I hate him still, and so to get even with her I would play badly, play all the sour notes I knew. And then came the little louse, as I was saying, a real louse which had gotten buried in my winter underwear. I got him out and I put him tenderly on the tip of a black key. Then I began to do a little gigue around him with my right hand; the noise had probably deafened him. He was hypnotized, it seemed, by my nimble pyrotechnic. This trancelike immobility finally got on my nerves. I decided to introduce a chromatic scale, coming down on him full force with my third finger. I caught him fair and square, but with such force that he was glued to my fingertip. That put the St. Vitus Dance in me. From then on the scherzo commenced.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  One day Bongani came to me and said, “You know what would make a lot of money? Instead of copying whole albums, why don’t you put the best tracks of different albums onto one CD, because people only wanna hear the songs they like.” That sounded like a great idea, so I started making mix CDs. Those sold well. Then a few weeks later Bongani came back and said, “Can you make the tracks fade into one another so the music moves from track one to track two without a break and the beat carries on? It’ll be like a DJ playing a complete set the whole night.” That sounded like a great idea, too. I downloaded a program called BPM, “beats per minute.” It had a graphical interface that looked like two vinyl records side by side, and I could mix and fade between songs, basically everything a DJ can do live. I started making party CDs, and those started selling like hotcakes, too. — Business was booming. By matric I was balling, making 500 rand a week. To put that in perspective, there are maids in South Africa who still earn less than that today. It’s a shit salary if you’re trying to support a family, but as a sixteen-year-old living at home with no real expenses, I was living the dream. For the first time in my life I had money, and it was the most liberating thing in the world. The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  “Okay, I’m going to find you a date. She’s going to be the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen, and you’re going to take her to the matric dance and you’re going to be a superstar.” The dance was still two months away. I promptly forgot about Tom and his ridiculous deal. Then he came over to my house one afternoon and popped his head into my room. “I found the girl.” “Really?” “Yeah. You have to come and meet her.” I knew Tom was full of shit, but the thing that makes a con man successful is that he never gives you nothing. He delivers just enough to keep you believing. Tom had introduced me to many beautiful women. He was never dating them, but he talked a good game, and was always around them. So when he said he had a girl, I didn’t doubt him. The two of us jumped on a bus and headed into the city. The girl lived in a run-down block of flats downtown. We found her building, and a girl leaned over the balcony and waved us inside. That was the girl’s sister Lerato, Tom said. Come to find out, he’d been trying to get with Lerato, and setting me up with the sister was his way in—of course, Tom was working an angle. It was dark in the lobby. The elevator was busted, so we walked up several flights. This girl Lerato brought us into the flat. In the living room was this giant, but I mean really, really enormous, fat woman. I was like, Oh, Tom. I see what you’ve done here. Nicely played. Tom was a big joker as well. “Is this my date?” I asked. “No, no, no,” he said. “This is not your date. This is her older sister. Your date is Babiki. Babiki has three older sisters, and Lerato is her younger sister. Babiki’s gone to the store to buy groceries. She’ll be back in a moment.” We waited, chatted with the older sister. Ten minutes later the door opened and the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in my life walked in. She was…good Lord. Beautiful eyes, beautiful golden yellow-brown skin. It was like she glowed. No girl at my high school looked anything like her. “Hi,” she said. “Hi,” I replied.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  She is the lubet, the abominate and the sublimate—with a dash of hydrochloric acid, nitroglycerin, laudanum and powdered onyx. Opulence she has, and magnificence; it’s America right or wrong, and the ocean on either side. For the first time in my life the whole continent hits me full force, hits me between the eyes. This is America, buffaloes or no buffaloes, America the emery wheel of hope and disillusionment. Whatever made America made her, bone, blood, muscle, eyeball, gait, rhythm, poise, confidence, brass and hollow gut. She’s almost on top of me, the full face gleaming like calcium. The big soft fur is slipping from her shoulder. She doesn’t notice it. She doesn’t seem to care if her clothes should drop off. She doesn’t give a fuck about anything. It’s America moving like a streak of lightning toward the glass warehouse of red-blooded hysteria. Amurrica, fur or no fur, shoes or no shoes. Amurrica C.O.D. And scram, you bastards, before we plug you! It’s got me in the guts, I’m quaking. Something’s coming to me and there’s no dodging it. She’s coming head on, through the plate glass window. If she would only stop a second, if she would only let me be for just one moment. But no, not a single moment does she grant me. Swift, ruthless, imperious, like Fate itself she is on me, a sword cutting me through and through. . . . She has me by the hand, she holds it tight. I walk beside her without fear. Inside me the stars are twinkling; inside me a great blue vault where a moment ago the engines were pounding furiously. One can wait a whole lifetime for a moment like this. The woman whom you never hoped to meet now sits before you, and she talks and looks exactly like the person you dreamed about. But strangest of all is that you never realized before that you had dreamed about her. Your whole past is like a long sleep which would have been forgotten had there been no dream. And the dream too might have been forgotten had there been no memory, but remembrance is there in the blood and the blood is like an ocean in which everything is washed away but that which is new and more substantial even than life: REALITY. We are seated in a little booth in the Chinese restaurant across the way. Out of the corner of my eye I catch the flicker of the illuminated letters running up and down the sky. She is still talking about Henriette, or maybe it is about herself. Her little black bonnet, her bag and fur are lying beside her on the bench.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  The crackhead protests a bit, but then he takes the money because he’s a crackhead and it’s cash and crack is all about the now. Then Bongani goes back to the working guy. “All right. We’ll do one-twenty. Here’s your DVD player. It’s yours.” “But I don’t have the one-twenty.” “It’s cool. You can take it now, only instead of one-twenty you give us one-forty when you get your wages.” “Okay.” So now we’ve invested 50 rand with the crackhead and that gets us 140 from the working guy. But Bongani would see a way to flip it and grow it again. Let’s say this guy who bought the DVD player worked at a shoe store. “How much do you pay for a pair of Nikes with your staff discount?” Bongani would ask. “I can get a pair of Nikes for one-fifty.” “Okay, instead of you giving us one-forty, we’ll give you ten and you get us a pair of Nikes with your discount.” So now this guy’s walking away with a DVD player and 10 rand in his pocket. He’s feeling like he got a good deal. He brings us the Nikes and then we go to one of the cheesier cheese boys up in East Bank and we say, “Yo, dude, we know you want the new Jordans. They’re three hundred in the shops. We’ll sell them to you for two hundred.” We sell him the shoes, and now we’ve gone and turned 60 rand into 200. That’s the hood. Someone’s always buying, someone’s always selling, and the hustle is about trying to be in the middle of that whole thing. None of it was legal. Nobody knew where anything came from. The guy who got us Nikes, did he really have a “staff discount”? You don’t know. You don’t ask. It’s just, “Hey, look what I found” and “Cool, how much do you want?” That’s the international code. At first I didn’t know not to ask. I remember one time we bought a car stereo or something like that. “But who did this belong to?” I said. “Eh, don’t worry about it,” one of the guys told me. “White people have insurance.” “Insurance?” “Yeah, when white people lose stuff they have insurance policies that pay them cash for what they’ve lost, so it’s like they’ve lost nothing.” “Oh, okay,” I said. “Sounds nice.” And that was as far as we ever thought about it: When white people lose stuff they get money, just another nice perk of being white.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The before-dinner atmosphere, the blend of patchouli, warm pitchblende, iced electricity, sugared sweat and powdered urine drives one on to a fever of delirious expectancy. Christ will never more come down to earth nor will there be any lawgiver, nor will murder cease, nor theft, nor rape, and yet . . . and yet one expects something, something terrifyingly marvelous and absurd, perhaps a cold lobster with mayonnaise served gratis, perhaps an invention, like the electric light, like television, only more devastating, more soul-rending, an invention unthinkable that will bring a shattering calm and void, not the calm and void of death but of life such as the monks dreamed, such as is dreamed still in the Himalayas, in Tibet, in Lahore, in the Aleutian Islands, in Polynesia, in Easter Island, the dream of men before the flood, before the word was written, the dream of cave men and anthropophagists, of those with double sex and short tails, of those who are said to be crazy and have no way of defending themselves because they are outnumbered by those who are not crazy. Cold energy trapped by cunning brutes and then set free like explosive rockets, wheels intricately interwheeled to give the illusion of force and speed, some for light, some for power, some for motion, words wired by maniacs and mounted like false teeth, perfect, and repulsive as lepers, ingratiating, soft, slippery, nonsensical movement, vertical, horizontal, circular, between walls and through walls, for pleasure, for barter, for crime, for sex; all light, movement, power impersonally conceived, generated, and distributed throughout a choked, cuntlike cleft intended to dazzle and awe the savage, the yokel, the alien, but nobody dazzled or awed, this one hungry, that one lecherous, all one and the same and no different from the savage, the yokel, the alien, except for odds and ends, bric-à-brac, the soapsuds of thought, the sawdust of the mind. In the same cunty cleft, trapped and undazzled, millions have walked before me, among them one, Blaise Cendrars, who afterwards flew to the moon, thence back to earth and up the Orinoco impersonating a wild man but actually sound as a button, though no longer vulnerable, no longer mortal, a splendiferous hulk of a poem dedicated to the archipelago of insomnia. Of those with fever few hatched, among them myself still unhatched, but pervious and maculate, knowing with quiet ferocity the ennui of ceaseless drift and movement. Before dinner the slat and chink of sky light softly percolating through the bounded gray dome, the vagrant hemispheres spored with blue-egged nuclei coagulating, ramifying, in the one basket lobsters, in the other the germination of a world antiseptically personal and absolute. Out of the manholes, gray with the underground life, men of the future world saturated with shit, the iced electricity biting into them like rats, the day done in and darkness coming on like the cool, refreshing shadows of the sewers.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  All my sensations had gathered on the surface of the skin and underneath the outermost layer of skin I was empty, light as a feather, lighter than air or smoke or talcum or magnesium or any goddamned thing you want. Suddenly I was a Chippewa and it was the key of sassafras again and I didn’t give a fuck whether the girls were screaming or fainting or shitting in their pants, which they were minus anyway. Looking at crazy Agnes with the rosary around her neck and her big breadbasket blue with fright I got the notion to do a sacrilegious dance, with one hand cupping my balls and the other hand thumbing my nose at the thunder and lightning. The rain was hot and cold and the grass seemed full of dragonflies. I hopped about like a kangaroo and I yelled at the top of my lungs—“O Father, you wormy old son of a bitch, pull in that fucking lightning or Agnes won’t believe in you any more! Do you hear me, you old prick up there, stop the shenanigans . . . you’re driving Agnes nutty. Hey you, are you deaf, you old futzer?” And with a continuous rattle of this defiant nonsense on my lips I danced around the bathhouse, leaping and bounding like a gazelle and using the most frightful oaths I could summon. When the lightning cracked I jumped higher and when the thunder clapped I roared like a lion and then I did a handspring and then I rolled in the grass like a cub and I chewed the grass and spit it out for them and I pounded my chest like a gorilla and all the time I could see the Czerny exercises resting on the piano, the white page full of sharps and flats, and the fucking idiot, think I to myself, imagining that that’s the way to learn how to manipulate the well-tempered clavichord. And suddenly I thought that Czerny might be in heaven by now and looking down on me and so I spat up at him high as I could spit and when the thunder rolled again I yelled with all my might—“You bastard, Czerny, you up there, may the lightning twist your balls off . . . may you swallow your own crooked tail and strangle yourself . . . do you hear me, you crazy prick?” But in spite of all my good efforts Agnes was getting more delirious. She was a dumb Irish Catholic and she had never heard God spoken to that way before. Suddenly, while I was dancing about in the rear of the bathhouse she bolted for the river. I heard Francie scream—“Bring her back, she’ll drown herself!

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Bongani lived in Alexandra. Where Soweto is a sprawling, government-planned ghetto, Alexandra is a tiny, dense pocket of a shantytown, left over from the pre-apartheid days. Rows and rows of cinder-block and corrugated-iron shacks, practically stacked on top of one another. Its nickname is Gomorrah because it has the wildest parties and the worst crimes. Street parties are the best thing about Alexandra. You get a tent, put it up in the middle of the road, take over the street, and you’ve got a party. There’s no formal invitations or guest list. You just tell a few people, word of mouth travels, and a crowd appears. There are no permits, nothing like that. If you own a tent, you have the right to throw a party in your street. Cars creep up to the intersection and the driver will see the party blocking their way and shrug and make a U-turn. Nobody gets upset. The only rule is that if you throw a party in front of somebody’s house, they get to come and share your alcohol. The parties don’t end until someone gets shot or a bottle gets broken on someone’s face. That’s how it has to end; otherwise, it wasn’t a party. Back then, most DJs could spin for only a few hours; they were limited by the number of vinyls they could buy. Since parties went all night, you might need five or six DJs to keep the dancing going. But I had a massive hard drive stuffed with MP3s, which is why Bongani was excited when he saw me mixing—he saw a way to corner the market. “How much music do you have?” he asked. “Winamp says I can play for a week.” “We’ll make a fortune.” Our first gig was a New Year’s Eve party the summer we graduated from Sandringham. Bongani and I took my tower, my giant monitor, and all the cables and the keyboard and the mouse. We loaded everything up in a minibus and brought it over to Alex. We took over the street in front of his house, ran the electricity out of his place, set up the computer, set up speakers, and borrowed a tent, and people came. It was explosive. By midnight the whole street was packed from one end to the other. Ours was the biggest New Year’s Eve party in Alexandra that year, and to have the biggest party in Alexandra is no joke. All night, from far and wide, people kept coming. The word spread: “There’s a light-skinned guy who plays music on a computer. You’ve never seen anything like it.” I DJ’d by myself until dawn. By then me and my friends were so drunk and exhausted that we passed out on the lawn outside Bongani’s house. The party was so big it made our reputation in the hood, instantly. Pretty soon we were getting booked all over. Which was a good thing.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Then we’d go to the party. We’d invite the girl, who was usually thrilled to escape her mother’s prison. The guy would bring the beer, he’d get to hang out with the girl, we’d write off the mom’s debt to show her our gratitude, and we’d make our money back selling the beer. There was always a way to make it work. And often that was the most fun part: working the angles, solving the puzzle, seeing what goes where, who needs what, whom we can connect with who can then get us the money. At the peak of our operation we probably had around 10,000 rand in capital. We had loans going out and interest coming in. We had our stockpile of Jordans and DVD players we’d bought to resell. We also had to buy blank CDs, hire minibuses to go to our DJ gigs, feed five guys three times a day. We kept track of everything on the computer. Having lived in my mom’s world, I knew how to do spreadsheets. We had a Microsoft Excel document laid out: everybody’s name, how much they owed, when they paid, when they didn’t pay. After work was when business started to pick up. Minibus drivers picking up one last order, men coming home from work. The men weren’t looking for soap and Corn Flakes. They wanted the gear—DVD players, CD players, PlayStation games. More guys would come through selling stuff, too, because they’d been out hustling and stealing all day. There’d be a guy selling a cellphone, a guy selling some leather jackets, a guy selling shoes. There was this one dude who looked like a black version of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. He’d always come by at the end of his shift with the most random useless crap, like an electric toothbrush without the charger. One time he brought us an electric razor. “What the hell is this?” “It’s an electric razor?” “An electric razor? We’re black. Do you know what these things do to our skin? Do you see anyone around here who can use an electric razor?” We never knew where he was getting this stuff from. Because you don’t ask. Eventually we pieced it together, though: He worked at the airport. It was all crap he was boosting from people’s luggage.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “Why do you smile?” he asked. “Because, sir, pay like water tends to find its level!” “What the devil d’ye mean by its level?” “The level,” I went on, “is surely the market price; sooner or later it’ll rise towards that and I can wait.” His keen grey eyes suddenly bored into me. “I begin to think you’re much older, than you look, as my nephew here tells me,” he said. “Put yourself down at a hundred a month for the present and in a little while we’ll perhaps find the ‘level,’” and he smiled. I thanked him and went out to my work. It seemed as if incidents were destined to crowd my life.... A day or so after this the taciturn steward, Payne, came and asked me if I’d go out with him to dinner and some theatre or other? I had not had a day off in five or six months so I said “Yes.” He gave me a great dinner at a famous French restaurant (I forget the name now) and wanted me to drink champagne. But I had already made up my mind not to touch any intoxicating liquor till I was twenty one and so I told him simply that I had taken the pledge. He beat about the bush a great deal, but at length said that as I was bookkeeper in place of Curtis, he hoped we should get along as he and Curtis had done. I asked him just what he meant but he wouldn’t speak plainly which excited my suspicions. A day or two afterwards I got into talk with a butcher in another quarter of the town and asked him what he would supply seventy pounds of beef and fifty pounds of mutton for, daily for a hotel; he gave me a price so much below the price Payne was paying that my suspicions were confirmed. I was tremendously excited. In my turn I invited Payne to dinner and led up to the subject. At once he said “of course there’s a ‘rake-off’ and if you’ll hold in with me, I’ll give you a third as I gave Curtis. The ‘rake-off’ don’t hurt anyone,” he went on, “for I buy below market-price.” Of course I was all ears and eager interest when he admitted that the ‘rake-off’ was on everything he bought and amounted to about 20 per cent. of the cost. By this he changed his wages from two hundred dollars a month into something like two hundred dollars a week.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  She’d told me to tell her when it started burning. She should have told me to tell her when it started tingling, because by the time it was actually burning it had already taken off several layers of my scalp. I was well past tingling when I started to freak out. “It’s burning! It’s burning!” She rushed me over to the sink and started to rinse the relaxer out. What I didn’t know is that the chemical doesn’t really start to burn until it’s being rinsed out. I felt like someone was pouring liquid fire onto my head. When she was done I had patches of acid burns all over my scalp. I was the only man in the salon; it was all women. It was a window into what women experience to look good on a regular basis. Why would they ever do this?, I thought. This is horrible. But it worked. My hair was completely straight. The woman combed it back, and I looked like a pimp, a pimp named Slickback. Bongani then dragged me back to the first salon, and the woman agreed to cornrow my hair. She worked slowly. It took six hours. Finally she said, “Okay, you can look in the mirror.” She turned me around in the chair and I looked in the mirror and…I had never seen myself like that before. It was like the makeover scenes in my American movies, where they take the dorky guy or girl, fix the hair and change the clothes, and the ugly duckling becomes the swan. I’d been so convinced I’d never get a date that I never tried to look nice for a girl, so I didn’t know that I could. The hair was good. My skin wasn’t perfect, but it was getting better; the pustules had receded into regular pimples. I looked…not bad. I went home, and my mom squealed when I walked in the door. “Ooooooh! They turned my baby boy into a pretty little girl! I’ve got a little girl! You’re so pretty!” “Mom! C’mon. Stop it.” “Is this the way you’re telling me that you’re gay?” “What? No. Why would you say that?” “You know it’s okay if you are.” “No, Mom. I’m not gay.” Everyone in my family loved it. They all thought it looked great. My mom did tease the shit out of me, though. “It’s very well done,” she said, “but it is way too pretty. You do look like a girl.” — The big night finally came. Tom came over to help me get ready. The hair, the clothes, everything came together perfectly. Once I was set, we went to Abel to get the keys to the BMW, and that was the moment the whole night started to go wrong.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Donna even came downstairs and made popcorn and put it in a big yellow bowl on the table for everybody to eat. She ate lazily, her large hand dawdling in the bowl. “It could be okay. Interesting people could come in. Even though that lawyer’s probably an asshole.” My mother sat quietly, pleased with her role in the job-finding project, pinching clusters of popcorn in her fingers and popping them into her mouth. That night I put my new work clothes on a chair and looked at them. A brown skirt, a beige blouse. I was attracted to the bland ugliness, but I didn’t know how long that would last. I looked at their gray shapes in the night-light and then rolled over toward the dark corner of my bed. My family’s enthusiasm made me feel sarcastic about the job—about any effort to do anything, in fact. In light of their enthusiasm, the only intelligent course of action seemed to be immobility and rudeness. But in the morning, as I ate my poached eggs and toast, I couldn’t help but feel curious and excited. The feeling grew as I rode in the car with my mother to the receding orange building. I felt like I was accomplishing something. I wanted to do well. When we drove past the Amy Joy doughnut shop, I saw, through a wall of glass, expectant construction workers in heavy boots and jackets sitting on vinyl swivel seats, waiting for coffee and bags of doughnuts. I had sentimental thoughts about workers and the decency of unthinking toil. I was pleased to be like them, insofar as I was. I returned my mother’s smile when I got out of the car and said “thanks” when she said “good luck.” “Well, here you are,” said the lawyer. He clapped his short, hard-packed little hands together and made a loud noise. “On time. Good morning!” He began training me then and continued to do so all week. No interesting people came into the office. Very few people came into the office at all. The first week there were three. One was a nervous middle-aged woman who had an uneven haircut and was wearing lavender rubber children’s boots. She sat on the edge of the waiting room chair with her rubber boots together, rearranging the things in her purse. Another was a fat woman in a bright, baglike dress who had yellow in the whites of her wild little eyes, and who carried her purse like a weapon. The last was a man who sat desperately turning his head as if he wanted to disconnect it from his body. I could hear him raising his voice inside the lawyer’s office. When he left, the lawyer came out and said, “He is completely crazy,” and told me to type him a bill for five hundred dollars.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He sighed. “You’re really not a masochist, you know.” She shrugged. “Maybe not. It always seemed like I was.” “You might have fantasies, but I don’t think you have any concept of a real slave mentality. You have too much ego to be part of another person.” “I don’t know, I’ve never had the chance to try it. I’ve never met anyone I wanted to do that with.” “If you were a slave, you wouldn’t make the choice.” “All right, I’m not a slave. With me it’s more a matter of love.” She was just barely aware that she was pitching her voice higher and softer than it was naturally, so that she sounded like a cartoon girl. “It’s like the highest form of love.” He thought this was really cute. Sure it was nauseating, but it was feminine in a radio-song kind of way. “You don’t seem interested in love. It’s not about that for you.” “That’s not true. That’s not true at all. Why do you think I was so rough back there? Deep down, I’m afraid I’ll fall in love with you, that I’ll need to be with you and fuck you...forever.” He was enjoying himself now. He was beginning to see her as a locked garden that he could sneak into and sit in for days, tearing the heads off the flowers. On one hand, she was beside herself with bliss. On the other, she was scrutinizing him carefully from behind an opaque facade as he entered her pasteboard scene of flora and fauna. Could he function as a character in this landscape? She imagined sitting across from him in a Japanese restaurant, talking about anything. He would look intently into her eyes.... He saw her apartment and then his. He saw them existing a nice distance apart, each of them blocked off by cleanly cut boundaries. Her apartment bloomed with scenes that spiraled toward him in colorful circular motions and then froze suddenly and clearly in place. She was crawling blindfolded across the floor. She was bound and naked in an S&M bar. She was sitting next to him in a taxi, her skirt pulled up, his fingers in her vagina. ...and then they would go back to her apartment. He would beat her and fuck her mouth. Then he would go home to his wife, and she would make dinner for him. It was so well balanced, the mere contemplation of it gave him pleasure. The next day he would send her flowers. He let go of the wheel with one hand and patted her head. She gripped his shirt frantically. He thought: This could work out fine. Something Nice “What’s your name, sir?” The freckled woman wore green stretch pants, and had her red hair tucked under a neat pink scarf. “Fred?” She was making her naturally coarse voice go soft and moist as warm mayonnaise. “I’d like you to meet my girlfriends, Fred.”

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  141 LECTURE 15 THE FIRST GREAT AWAKENING A revival is a form of what scholars sometimes call religious enthusiasm, that is, a subjective experience that makes your body respond and defies the rules of reason and logic. Almost all religious communities have some kind of ritual or gathering in which members express enthusiasm. In Christianity, the first revival was at Pentecost, which was recorded in the book of Acts, chapter 2. According to the account in Acts, Christ’s apostles were seated together and, in a rush of wind and fire, the Holy Spirit descended on the group and gave them the power to speak in tongues. 142The History of Christianity II Christian revivals are as old as Christianity itself. But they became an especially inf luential and common cultural form in Protestantism, after the Reformation. This lecture focuses on the grandfather of all modern revivals, the First Great Awakening. PRELUDE TO REVIVAL õThe First Great Awakening spanned the middle of the 18 th century, but its prelude begins earlier. The Puritans of Scotland held revivals starting in the 17 th century that they called long communions. They were basically rowdy, outdoor communion ceremonies that could last several days. õOne of the great early Scottish revivals happened at the kirk of Shotts, near the city of Glasgow. In 1625, a fiery young Presbyterian preacher named John Livingston started traveling around this part of the country, preaching on the need for true conversion to Christ. He was also a vocal opponent of the office of the bishop, which was a controversial issue in Scotland at the time, and he had been formally banned from the parish of Shotts. õBut that didn’t stop him. In June of 1630 he came to Shotts to join a few other ministers in celebrating one of these long communions. They preached pretty much nonstop for four or five days, day and night, and thousands of people from all over southwest Scotland came to listen. Some people were so overcome by his words that they fainted and fell to the ground. õThat wasn’t the only branch: In 1707, reports started filtering out of children’s revivals in a part of Europe called Silesia, in what is now Poland and eastern Germany. Children proclaimed they felt God’s grace. In the early 18 th century came bigger and bolder revivals, first in Europe, then moving along down the American coast and also up in the Canadian Maritimes. 143Lecture 15—The First Great Awakening THE CONVERSION OF GEORGE WHITEFIELD õWhen scholars talk about the First Great Awakening, they are usually referring to a series of revivals that began in the 1720s and 1730s in New England, the mid-Atlantic colonies, and Britain, followed by revivals that spread south and north along the North American seaboard, the last of which happened in the 1780s.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Maxie was so confused and flustered that he couldn’t disengage a bill without pulling the wad out of his pocket. Leaning over the coffin reverently I peeled off the topmost bill from the wad which was peeping out of his pocket. I couldn’t tell whether it was a single or a ten spot. I didn’t stop to examine it but tucked it away as rapidly as possible and straightened myself up. Then I took Maxie by the arm and returned to the kitchen where the family were eating solemnly but heartily. They wanted me to stay for a bite, and it was awkward to refuse, but I refused as best I could and beat it, my face twitching now with hysterical laughter. At the corner, by the lamppost, Curley was waiting for me. By this time I couldn’t restrain myself any longer. I grabbed Curley by the arm and rushing him down the street I began to laugh, to laugh as I have seldom laughed in my life. I thought it would never stop. Every time I opened my mouth to start explaining the incident I had an attack. Finally I got frightened. I thought maybe I might laugh myself to death. After I had managed to quiet down a bit, in the midst of a long silence, Curley suddenly says: “Did you get it?” That precipitated another attack, even more violent than before. I had to lean against a rail and hold my guts. I had a terrific pain in the guts but a pleasurable pain. What relieved me more than anything was the sight of the bill I had filched from Maxie’s wad. It was a twenty-dollar bill! That sobered me up at once. And at the same time it enraged me a bit. It enraged me to think that in the pocket of that idiot, Maxie, there were still more bills, probably more twenties, more tens, more fives. If he had come out with me, as I suggested, and if I had taken a good look at that wad I would have felt no remorse in blackjacking him. I don’t know why it should have made me feel so, but it enraged me. The most immediate thought was to get rid of Curley as quickly as possible—a five spot would fix him up—and then go on a little spree. What I particularly wanted was to meet some low-down, filthy cunt who hadn’t a spark of decency in her. Where to meet one like that . . . just like that? Well, get rid of Curley first. Curley, of course, is hurt. He had expected to stick with me. He pretends not to want the five bucks, but when he sees that I’m willing to take it back, he quickly stows it away. Again the night, the incalculably barren, cold, mechanical night of New York in which there is no peace, no refuge, no intimacy.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  The money kept rolling in and I was balling out of control. This is how balling I was: I bought a cordless telephone. This was before everyone had a cellphone. The range on this cordless phone was strong enough that I could put the base outside my window, walk the two blocks to McDonald’s, order my large number one, walk back home, go up to my room, and fire up my computer, carrying on a conversation the whole time. I was that dude walking down the street holding a giant phone to my ear with the aerial fully extended, talking to my friend. “Yeah, I’m just goin’ down to McDonald’s…” Life was good, and none of it would have happened without Andrew. Without him, I would never have mastered the world of music piracy and lived a life of endless McDonald’s. What he did, on a small scale, showed me how important it is to empower the dispossessed and the disenfranchised in the wake of oppression. Andrew was white. His family had access to education, resources, computers. For generations, while his people were preparing to go to university, my people were crowded into thatched huts singing, “Two times two is four. Three times two is six. La la la la la.” My family had been denied the things his family had taken for granted. I had a natural talent for selling to people, but without knowledge and resources, where was that going to get me? People always lecture the poor: “Take responsibility for yourself! Make something of yourself!” But with what raw materials are the poor to make something of themselves? People love to say, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” What they don’t say is, “And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.” That’s the part of the analogy that’s missing. Working with Andrew was the first time in my life I realized you need someone from the privileged world to come to you and say, “Okay, here’s what you need, and here’s how it works.” Talent alone would have gotten me nowhere without Andrew giving me the CD writer. People say, “Oh, that’s a handout.” No. I still have to work to profit by it. But I don’t stand a chance without it. — One afternoon I was in my room making a CD when Bongani came over to pick up his inventory. He saw me mixing songs on my computer. “This is insane,” he said. “Are you doing this live?” “Yeah.” “Trevor, I don’t think you understand; you’re sitting on a gold mine. We need to do this for a crowd. You need to come to the township and start DJ’ing gigs. No one has ever seen a DJ playing on a computer before.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  It’s the most incredible thing.” “Oh, Jesus Christ, that record came out ten years ago,” said Rita. “Just because you’ve only heard it for the first time.” Eliot tore the record from its jacket, tossed the jacket across the room and knelt before the turntable. He lifted the needle and examined it, blowing delicately. Rita threw her long legs up and sat with her small bony knees together, her feet toeing in. “Who are you in love with?” “You know, she’s still showing those stupid home movies of you in the bathtub,” said Eliot. “She watches them and masturbates. It’s hilarious. She shows them to everybody.” “Who is it?” asked Rita. “This girl at the store named Daisy.” “Oh. I guess it figures.” She leaned forward to the cluttered table for a match. Her dark hair fell across her face with the graceful motion of a folding wing. She leaned back, exposing her face again. The lines under her eyes were deep and black with smeared makeup. “Got any pills, Joe?” Eliot jumped up. “Don’t say that!” he screamed. “Oh, you asshole,” said Rita. “Got any…socks?” “Sure.” Joey poured a colorful tumble into her palm. “What are you trying to do to me?” said Eliot through his teeth. “Are you working for them or what?” Joey looked around; they really had torn up the apartment. Dead plants were turned over in their broken pots, slashed pillows spilled yellow foam out onto the floor, cardboard boxes lay with their lids yanked open, their contents exposed and strewn. The filing cabinet was tipped over, its open drawers freeing a white dance of paper. At least the broken bottles had been swept safely into piles. Eliot’s rare book collection was preserved in a prim stack beside the couch. Joey could see the three Bartolovs he’d sold him. Eliot had been awed when he’d discovered that Joey’s pill connection was Alexander Bartolov, the famous poet. “Oh, come on Rita, just a little blow job,” said Eliot. “I won’t come or anything.” “Forget it,” said Rita. She lay back into the couch, her spidery white hand over her eyes. Her long limp legs recalled the flying grasshopper on Daisy’s valentine. “She’s still hot for you, you know,” said Eliot. “I still have to hear about the times you tied her up and spanked her.” “Can’t we change the subject?” said Joey. “Okay,” said Eliot cheerfully. “I’m going to the bathroom anyway. I’m nauseous.” “Don’t relax,” said Rita. “He’ll be back in a minute.” “It’s all right with me,” said Joey. He took a magazine off the table.