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 63 of 182 · 20 per page

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  A lot of the day I was out on the common. It was harmless and healthy, and though I'd overheard remarks about leathery old Colonel Palgrave who sunbathed in the long grass by the woods with nothing on, I never had a sense of danger. Sometimes I tagged along unwelcomely with Charlie and his friends as they stumbled round complaining and calling things bummers; often I played out complex romantic games on my own, or dared myself to clamber up trees, giving instructions to an imaginary person following me. Once or twice I stumped around on the edge of a group that included Mark Lyle, ready to drift off if they got threatening. We had a huge, friendly dog at that time, who ran away if I didn't keep him on a lead, but who was a good way of meeting people. I was embarrassed to tell boys from the Flats he was called Sibelius, and pretended his name was Bach, which led to one or two jokes but by no means eased the problems of discipline. I became increasingly excited when I saw Mark Lyle, and my early troubles of manhood about that time took him as their object and even as their cause. One day he was up by the pond with some other boys and a couple of girls. They were trying to fly a kite in the intermittent breeze, but after a few dips and a few spoolings-out of the thread it would smack to earth. Then the thread got snagged in a sapling pine, and the others suddenly lost interest in the whole idea of kite-flying and sloped off. With heart thumping, and not knowing what to say, I came forward and started to disentangle the cotton line from the little tree. Mark Lyle looked at me and didn't say anything either. We worked it clumsily free, managing to ravel up the rest ofit in a series ofloops that tugged into knots as we tried to pull them straight. Still not speaking except in grunts of concentration and annoyance we bundled the whole lot up and went off to the bench to work on it. "This is a fucking game," said Mark Lyle after a bit. It was fantastic to be spoken to like that. I perched there in the swirl of his swearword and his Old Spice, looking into a new life of almost frightening pleasure. I glanced at him shyly; his shirt was half-unbuttoned and I could see a brown nipple as he leant forward. Sometimes our hands touched as we rolled the cleared thread on to the plastic reel. "That Dave Dobbs is a fucking cunt," he said.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I ticked myself off in a muttering, good-humoured monologue for yet again taking so long, solitary and scenically roundabout a route to somewhere that was close by at the start: the luminous hands of my watch showed 11.20. I felt very far from home and stood still for a moment to test my sex-drive, like checking the oil in a car, decided there was enough for the time being and jogged on towards the music, and brief glares of light and boyish owl-calls on either side. Someone had a torch and was roaming about, turning it on and off and provoking shouts and groans, and the occasional laugh. Or maybe the laughs came from the torch-carrier himself, drunk and tediously mischievous. For a moment I found myself at the fading limit of his beam, uncertain if I was visible, or if I wanted to be, if I was an intruder or a stumbling new arrival at the darkened pleasure-dome, grateful for the usher's glowing wand. Then the beam jerked to my left, and picked out two men against a tree, jeans round their knees, an arm round a neck, a hand roughly grasping at a white bottom—before they twisted back into the darkness, too far on to care much or protest. The torch went out and I stood still while the floating image, a glimmering ectoplasmic bottom, wandered and faded. In a minute the light struck out again and I saw the whole garden revealed for several seconds. It was a wide circular clearing that would have been charming centuries ago, when the wood was no more than a nursery laid out in ranks and opening into tapering perspectives, but now was like something from a dream, with the huge impassive agitation of the trees above the circle of yew arbours, each with its gryphon-legged bench, and at the centre a brimming stone basin, mysteriously fed and clear. One or two youngsters were squatting on the basin's damp surround: they had the ghetto-blaster, tuned in to some night-time station high on nostalgia—Herman's Hermits, then Village People, zapped from time to time by meteorite bleeps and whines and the continental jabber of adjacent wavelengths. I loafed out with all the smothered expectation of a teen date, hands in pockets. One of the boys called out, "Hallo, how are You!" and when I got to them we shook hands and inspected each other in the shadowed flame of a Bic lighter. Then darkness again. Someone said he'd seen me in the Cassette, someone else thought he had too. There was a mood of bland concurrence, as a large plastic bottle was nudged into my hand and Dusty Springfield mentioned smokily that she just didn't know what to do with herself. One of my companions sang along, anticipating the words and getting them wrong.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I felt quite good in my leather jacket, charcoal 501s and tipped, tight-laced black Oxfords; nervous, but adrift and irresponsible. I'd seen the club extolled in a local listings magazine, and hovered with dismayed recognition over its central "portfolio" of skinny lads in shorts and swimwear and reports on fabulous nights at discos: the flashlit shots of the two or three cutest boys there and the overweight barman with his arm round a peroxided stripling were indistinguishable from those in the British gay press recalling the great time had at Kid or Zoom! or Croydon's ritzy Blue Fedora a desolate few weeks ago. Once inside the heavy sound-proofed door with its little wired judas I was in a place so familiar that I would not have been surprised to see my old friends Danny and Simon reaching through to lift drinks over the shoulders of those obstinately seated at the bar, or stalking and jumping around the tiny dance-floor. There was the same mad delusion of glamour, the same overpriced tawdriness, the same ditsy parochialism and sullen lardy queenery, and underneath it all the same urgency and defiance. We none of us wanted a palace: we liked this humming little hell-hole with its atrophied rules and characters, its ogres and mascots. Not that I could identify too completely. I was a newcomer, an unknown, a holidaymaker perhaps or shy debutant. A few heads turned, I thought, a few remarks were made. But as I got my bottle of expensively fashionable beer and wandered round I knew I hadn't gone down a bomb: something hard and proud in me wanted to shine, something homey and self-effacing was relieved I didn't. And of course your regulars don't all look for novelty: maybe they'd like to score with some strange angelic beauty but they know that heavy truck-driver with brown teeth and a famous dick will give them what they've been waiting for all week. The older men in the corner look with envy at the youngsters, but with a kind of disillusion too. I leant against a mirrored pillar and kept my eye on a bunch of kids who hung around mocking and caressing each other, sipping quickly and shiftily at Cokes and beers and bopping about with a knowing coy beauty on the edge of the floor. They seemed more in their element than anyone in the dismal thin Euro-pop interspersed with tired, tired disco classics which to them perhaps still had point and exhilaration. Is it legal? I found myself wondering as I watched a muscly little lad in a string vest and baggy hitched-up jeans licking blond froth from the black down on his upper lip and holding forth hoarsely like a schoolyard gangster. He couldn't be more than sixteen, surely?

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Leave off, will you,’ I whispered, thinking that a matter-of-fact request would do the trick. At the same time I crossed my legs, squashing my balls uncomfortably, to emphasise that I was not available. The sack-lifting boy was now sliding his finger up the other one’s ass, spitting on his big, blunt cock and preparing for the inevitable penetration. As he pressed its head against the boy’s glistening sphincter, which virtually filled the screen in lurid close-up, I felt an arm go along the back of the seat and a moment later a hand descend unfalteringly on my dick. I didn’t move but, sensing the power that speech had in this cryptic gathering, I said loudly and firmly: ‘If you come anywhere near me again I’ll break your neck.’ A couple of people looked round, there was an ‘Oooh’ from the other side of the room, spoken in a uniquely homosexual tone of bored outrage, the tentacles withdrew, and after a few moments, compatible perhaps with some fantastic notion of the preservation of dignity, the advancer retreated, earning a curse from the man at the end of the row, who was forced to get up again, attempting to conceal his erection as he did so. Exhilarated by my control of the situation, I spread myself again; the boy duly came over the other’s face, and very pretty it looked, the blobs and strings of spunk smeared over his eyelids, nose, and thick half-opened lips. Then, abruptly, it was another film. Half a dozen boys entered a locker-room, and at just the same moment the door from the stairs opened and something came in that looked, in the deep shadow, as if it might be nice. It was a sporty-looking boy with, evidently, a bag. He was not sure what to do, so I bent my telepathic powers on him. The poor creature struggled for a moment … but it was hopeless. He stumbled up towards the back, groped past the businessman (I heard him say ‘Sorry’) and sat a seat away from me, putting his bag on the seat between us. I let a little time elapse and distinctly heard him swallow, as if in lust and amazement, as the boys stripped off and, before we knew where we were, one of them was jacking off in the shower. Something made me certain that it was the first time he had been to a place like this, and I remembered how enchanting it is to see one’s first porn-film. ‘Christ! They’re really doing it,’ I recalled saying to myself, quite impressed by the way the actors seemed genuinely to be having sex for the pleasure of it, and by the blatant innocence of it all.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  deepening my voice, talking in monosyllables: “Cool.” “Great.” “Tough.” The language of the enemy. I signed up for a three-month membership and a set of ten training sessions, beginning the next day. I walked home exhil arated and terrified. I’d never thrown a punch in my entire life. That night, in another hot bath, I thought of Oscar and wondered if my boxing lessons might lead to a chance en counter. Maybe I’d enter an amateur boxing contest and he’d be the judge. And I’d impress him, despite my rough skills, with killer determination. My will to triumph would inspire him to take me under his wing, and he’d offer to let me work with him in his training camp. Working out with him, run ning trails in the woods near his camp, sparring with him alone in a dusky gym, we’d grow close. He’d mentor me with his body, and ever the willing, grateful pupil, I’d offer my heart in exchange. © When I walked into Blue Velvet the next day, my chest flut tered, like the first time I dared to enter a gay bar. Geno threw me a towel and told me to pick out a locker downstairs. Un dressing felt unreal. Whenever I’m naked in a new place, I get hard. When the air hits my skin, instead of getting goose bumps I stiffen, as if at any second I’m gonna get stroked. Un dressed, my body became alive, expectant, even though the locker room was deserted. The newness of the place and the rhythms of the gym above made me feel even more naked and alien. Upstairs, sexy disco music and testosterone were pumping at equal levels. There were a couple of guys working out in the ring, their bodies aflame with speed and sweat, throwing

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  We agreed that they weren't here, but both pandered to the other's half-hidden desire to see the place. Mrs Altidore had had it in mind from the start—Luc had talked of it so much of late, she said; he had got out the original plans and a book in which the architect had bound water-colour imaginings of the decor. There had been something of an argument because Luc wanted to ask his father to do it up and his mother had been against encouraging him in any more extravagance. I uncoiled the chain and bumped and shouldered the gates back. Then I brought the car in, gingerly, along the track, brushed and knocked about the roof and windows by the crowding lower branches. On either side of our headlights the plantation stretched away in exaggerated darkness. I thought Luc would have needed to be quite brave to come here alone. We came out into a wide tussocky field, the drive remembered and rutted by farm machinery, and juddered over a dully chiming cattle-grid. In front there was a high silhouette, a bulk of grey, that I steered towards, the car's underside slithering over long grass. Then there was a paved court stacked with farmer's hurdles and fueldrums and a mossy, moping statue peering down: it could have been anyone, a shepherd, a prophet, even Aurora herself. Beyond it a few steps rose to a padlocked steel door. This was better, it was adventure in a recognisable form—we clambered out and sniffed the air. On the far side of the little château stretched a ravaged lawn, marked out by the bloated thriving forms of what must once have been pyramids of yew. From the slippery elevation of the terrace I could see a pond, a lake, beyond it, choked with reeds and fallen branches. The light rose steadily, there were bars of orange above the tops of the firs, a blackbird started up, clear and unconcerned. It was just the time to see the place, not the kind of dawn Luc's grandfather had named the house for or would ever have witnessed there, cold skies above a drenched wilderness; though there were hints of classic pleasures, a cloud on the lake just big enough to clothe a god in a fresco stooping on a sex-quest. I'd lost Marcel; I wandered down towards the water, reluctantly moved by the relics of all this fake galanterie, my mind vaguely in summer, though a cold gust insisted it was December and made me twitch up Luc's jacket-collar. I turned back and saw the tiny top windows of the tower colour in the early sun, as though lanterns burnt in them.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  would have the guts to take him up on it. Unless maybe if he was blindfolded, so he couldn’t see who he was eating....” I felt my cock start to worm its way down the leg of my jeans like it had a life of its own. Amy said “Let me get this straight—Steve would be lying blindfolded on the bed, and we would just go in there anony mously and sit on his face?” “And if he correctly identifies all the women by taste alone, he wins a special prize,” said Seth, ever the wit. “A case of Scope,” said Amira, and everyone laughed. “It’s an amusing idea,” said Jennifer. “But I guarantee he won’t get any takers.” “Only one way to find out,” said Seth. Jennifer looked at me challengingly. “What do you say, Steve?” I swallowed hard. “Is the blindfold necessary?” There was a chorus of yesses and nods. They were all looking at me. Seth and Brad were amused, of course. Jennifer, the sturdy field hockey player with the firm jaw and blue eyes, looked triumphant, like she was about to win an argument. Amy, the skinny blonde who was the only one I had gone down on before, looked embarrassed. Mindy and Doris just looked curious. Amira was the only one who looked like she was turned on by the idea. When our eyes met, she dropped hers and smiled. “Let’s do it,” I said. “Good man!” said Seth with a chuckle. I went up to the second floor with Seth and Jennifer, who seemed to be the self-appointed referees for each gender. We found an empty bedroom and cleared the coats off the bed. Seth found a scarf and tied it around my head, almost burn ing me with his cigarette in the process. He left a generous

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  In five minutes it had exposed the sorry remains of the Hermitage on my left and in front of it a wide field that narrowed in the distance to another avenue and a glimpse of water. There wasn't a sign of life and I thought for a moment that perhaps I had missed the party, or that if I had listened to the boys at the gate I would now be in the otherwise inaccessible place where the action was. All the same I felt self-conscious, and wandered along by the Hermitage as if I had come here out of purely architectural interest. There was a domed pavilion linked by a colonnade to a low, shuttered house. It was a fragment, crudely restored as a cafe and what might have been a park-keeper's store. Families came here all year round; beyond the buildings there was a sandy enclosure with swings and a climbing-frame. I walked back past them and looked in at a window of the pavilion, where the moon picked out the gigantic trophy of a tea-urn. Away through the long grass, actions almost preceding the decision to take them, in the rampage of drink. Now I was in the mist that hung between giant beeches like dry ice in some romantic proscenium, tumbling slowly across the orchestra . . . The two worn rococo lions could barely see each other, flanking the dark canal that lay ahead. I walked beside the water to the very end, learning to read my way in the obscured moonlight and the reflecting spread of the pond-mist, my heart catching sometimes at a waiting figure that was only a lichened Pomona or Apollo, its features obliterated—if not quite its promise. I couldn't know if I was nearing the place or trekking further and further away, to a region where all that stirred would be stoats and foxes and the odd rattled wood-pigeon. Matt had spoken of a kind of formal garden, almost a maze as I imagined it. I came back down the other side of the canal, beginning to think I would go home, longing for a drink.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  clinging sweatily to each other, he stood in the middle of it all and pretended to fuck the space in front of him. Before he could think, This white boy can’t even fitch, I started doing it too, but with my arms throwing the punches. “That’s it, C, you got it.” He grinned at me. “Now let’s go.” I tried to forget that I was in a room of men, that there was violence going on not only around me but inside me. I found myself bobbing to the disco beat, hypnotized by the repetition of the punches, exhausted by each endless three-minute round. And I was amazed: I was throwing punches, I was hitting Ness’s padded hands, I was hitting him as he moved across the floor. I couldn’t believe I was hitting something, and it felt good to connect, leather against leather, when my knuckles struck his pads hard and direct. Sweat was dripping down my forehead; so I wiped my face with my arm. My hands were clubs—I had to hit something, anybody. Ness was grinning, leading me on, trying to fake me out with his own moves. The less I thought about what I was doing, the better I got. Maybe that’s what I was after: a body that worked without thinking, without remembering what to do, a muscle moving through space. I tried to imagine the two of us circling each other in bed. Who would top? Who would bottom? Already I felt how boxing becomes sex, the heat of two men moving in need, thrusting and sparring, arms locked in embrace—how in that haze of muscle and sweat, everything else drops away, the two bodies the only reality. But I couldn’t block out the surroundings: the weighted bags, the mirrors, and, especially, the other boxers as they moved through their workouts. Mostly black or Latino, they were young, fierce, and focused, pounding the heavy bags or sparring with partners. As Ness and I wove across the floor, we brushed against punching bags and sleek, wet bodies. I

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I met with a guidance counselor who talked me through my first college schedule, which put me in class only four days per week, never before nine thirty in the morning. After the Marine Corps and its five thirty A.M. wake-ups, I couldn’t believe my good fortune. Ohio State’s main campus in Columbus is about a hundred miles away from Middletown, meaning it was close enough for weekend visits to my family. For the first time in a few years, I could drop in on Middletown whenever I felt like it. And while Havelock (the North Carolina city closest to my Marine Corps base) was not too different from Middletown, Columbus felt like an urban paradise. It was (and remains) one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, powered in large part by the bustling university that was now my home. OSU grads were starting businesses, historic buildings were being converted into new restaurants and bars, and even the worst neighborhoods seemed to be undergoing significant revitalization. Not long after I moved to Columbus, one of my best friends began working as the promotions director for a local radio station, so I always knew what was happening around town and always had an in to the city’s best events, from local festivals to VIP seating for the annual fireworks show. In many ways, college was very familiar. I made a lot of new friends, but virtually all of them were from southwest Ohio. My six roommates included five graduates of Middletown High School and one graduate of Edgewood High School in nearby Trenton. They were a little younger (the Marine Corps had aged me past the age of the typical freshman), but I knew most of them from back home. My closest friends had already graduated or were about to, but many stayed in Columbus after graduation. Though I didn’t know it, I was witnessing a phenomenon that social scientists call “brain drain”—people who are able to leave struggling cities often do, and when they find a new home with educational and work opportunities, they stay there. Years later, I looked at my wedding party of six groomsmen and realized that every single one of them had, like me, grown up in a small Ohio town before leaving for Ohio State. To a man, all of them had found careers outside of their hometowns, and none of them had any interest in ever going back. By the time I started at Ohio State, the Marine Corps had instilled in me an incredible sense of invincibility. I’d go to classes, do my homework, study at the library, and make it home in time to drink well past midnight with my buddies, then wake up early to go running. My schedule was intense, but everything that had made me fear the independent college life when I was eighteen felt like a piece of cake now.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  your right hand clenched and raised as if you’re holding a tele phone. Keep the left hand before you, as if to pound on a door. Both hands hover at eye level, ready to jab forward into the face of an opponent or to deflect a blow to the head. “Now punch it,” Ness said, holding up a padded red glove that looked like a catcher’s mitt. I threw my first punch, a left, straight ahead into the red glove. Phap. “Good. Again.” Another left. Phap. “Good. Now give me a right.” A right hook is a harder punch, because the right hand has to travel farther across the space between two boxers in order to connect. It’s a complicated move that involves turning the whole body and churning power up through the legs so that the body becomes a spring, coiled with force. When I threw the right hook, my feet scraped the floor and my hip lurched, throwing me off my balance. I stopped mid move when I realized I had fucked up. “Naw, man. You gotta turn, move your hip into it. Like this.” Ness pantomimed the punch and raised his padded hand right to my face. “Pow,” he said, “like that, turn your whole body into it. Now do it.” I repeated the punch until he said stop. I got better with each repetition. My body learned the move, my foot shifted stiffly, my hip turned, my right arm crossed the space between us, all for that connection with the red pad: Phap. “Okay, C, let’s do a jab, then a hook, one-two, one-two, like when you fuck.” Ness held his hands low in front of him as if he were grip ping a pair of hips and gestured fucking. One-two, in-out. He grinned as he was doing this, and I couldn’t believe the raw ness of the move. Surrounded by men hitting leather bags or

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Strong died the following year. A splinter from a shell lodged in his head, & he spent some time in a mental hospital near St Albans. I used to think about him & imagine him raving: apparently he was sometimes quite insane. And then it was read out that he’d died. About a month later I received a letter saying he’d left me £50. It wasn’t in his will, but he had told his mother when he was in hospital that he wanted me to have something, & she had suspected then that he was going to die. She came over to have tea with the Second Master, who told me all this. By then things were beginning to turn round. The worship I felt for bigger boys, the heroic ones already taking on beauty as their leaving drew near, & the glamour of the Army glowed about them, was as strong, or almost so. But by the time I was 16 my eyes swung about & saw the younger boys. The emotions were far more complex, for being senior I had power, which I could use over them & then luxuriously abdicate in making my feelings clear. The idolatry was to do with not having—it was idealised, & above lust, which was catered for anyway by incessant parties, mutual pleasurings & painings. For two years or so we were utterly abandoned. An intoxicating, almost deranging mood possessed us. Of course there were one or two men who never joined in, who slept or pretended to sleep whilst the rest of us writhed round in passionate couplings or orgiastic free-for-alls. A boy called Carswell was our Lord of Misrule, an incredibly lusty little chap. We looked forward to night-time like some kind of animal that sits out the day, listless & almost blind; then as we undressed for bed a light came into our eyes. Not that we didn’t frig in the day-time too. Our conversation was as salty as we could make it, and there was excitement to be had in seizing brief opportunities for lust in ever more public places. The occasional exposures, as when Carswell was conspicuously brought off in Chapel, must have opened the eyes of the dons, if they didn’t know already, to the occupational depravity of the College men. Oh there will never again be a time of such freedom. It was the epitome of pleasure. When I sink back into the mood of those days, & then think of what happened afterwards, I am amazed. Those who were not killed are running the country & the empire, examples of righteousness, & each of them knowing they have done these unspeakable things. I suppose it is a part of the tacit lore of manhood, like going with whores or getting drunk, which are not incompatible with respectability and power.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  As much as I loved Ohio State and its people for an incredible education and experience, I could not put my fate in the hands of someone I didn’t know. I tried to talk myself into it. I even printed the form and drove it to campus. But when the time came, I crumpled it up and tossed it in the garbage. There would be no Stanford Law for J.D. I decided that I wanted to go to Yale more than any other school. It had a certain aura—with its small class sizes and unique grading system, Yale billed itself as a low-stress way to jump-start a legal career. But most of its students came from elite private colleges, not large state schools like mine, so I imagined that I had no chance of admission. Nonetheless, I submitted an application online, because that was relatively easy. It was late afternoon on an early spring day, 2010, when my phone rang and the caller ID revealed an unfamiliar 203 area code. I answered, and the voice on the other line told me that he was the director of admissions at Yale Law, and that I’d been admitted to the class of 2013. I was ecstatic and leaped around during the entire three-minute conversation. By the time he said goodbye, I was so out of breath that when I called Aunt Wee to tell her, she thought I’d just gotten into a car accident. I was sufficiently committed to going to Yale Law that I was willing to accept the two hundred thousand dollars or so in debt that I knew I’d accrue. Yet the financial aid package Yale offered exceeded my wildest dreams. In my first year, it was nearly a full ride. That wasn’t because of anything I’d done or earned—it was because I was one of the poorest kids in school. Yale offered tens of thousands in need-based aid. It was the first time being so broke paid so well. Yale wasn’t just my dream school, it was also the cheapest option on the table. The New York Times recently reported that the most expensive schools are paradoxically cheaper for low-income students. Take, for example, a student whose parents earn thirty thousand per year—not a lot of money but not poverty level, either. That student would pay ten thousand for one of the less selective branch campuses of the University of Wisconsin but would pay six thousand at the school’s flagship Madison campus. At Harvard, the student would pay only about thirteen hundred despite tuition of over forty thousand. Of course, kids like me don’t know this. My buddy Nate, a lifelong friend and one of the smartest people I know, wanted to go to the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, but he didn’t apply because he knew he couldn’t afford it. It likely would have cost him considerably less than Ohio State, just as Yale cost considerably less for me than any other school.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  into just the right position. Dinner is served, I thought. I dove back into her wet and pleasantly musky cunt, and went to work on her clit. Before long she was grinding herself gently against my mouth in a pleasantly familiar rhythm. “He’s good at this, Cheryl,” she said huskily, forgetting about staying anonymous. “Oh yeah? Are you going to come?” Cheryl the chaperone’s voice was teasing. “Maybe .. .” About a minute later she did, with a short, high-pitched groan that was equal parts surprise and pleasure. Putting modesty aside for a moment, I’m really very good at eating pussy. She rolled off me, giving me a needed breath of air, and then she kissed me briefly on the lips and said, “Thanks, stranger.” Cheryl was laughing. “You little slut, I can’t believe you just came on his face!” Emboldened by my success, I said, “I bet I can do the same thing for you.” “I wish I was wearing a skirt,” she said. “Maybe I would. But I’m not taking my pants off.” “You can wear my skirt, and I’ll put on your jeans,” said Party Girl. There was a moment of silence. Cheryl had clearly been trapped. “Sit on my face,” I said. “I promise you won’t regret it.” “Well hell, I guess it’s just one of those nights my Mama warned me about,” said Cheryl. I heard the welcome sound of a zipper going down. Some rustling and giggling, and then another warm shape looming above me, and another unique fragrance.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  “You don’t want your mom to go to jail, do you?” he asked. So I lied, with the express understanding that even though Mom would have her liberty, I could live with my grandparents whenever I wished. Mom would officially retain custody, but from that day forward I lived in her house only when I chose to—and Mamaw told me that if Mom had a problem with the arrangement, she could talk to the barrel of Mamaw’s gun. This was hillbilly justice, and it didn’t fail me. I remember sitting in that busy courtroom, with half a dozen other families all around, and thinking they looked just like us. The moms and dads and grandparents didn’t wear suits like the lawyers and judge. They wore sweatpants and stretchy pants and T-shirts. Their hair was a bit frizzy. And it was the first time I noticed “TV accents”—the neutral accent that so many news anchors had. The social workers and the judge and the lawyer all had TV accents. None of us did. The people who ran the courthouse were different from us. The people subjected to it were not. Identity is an odd thing, and I didn’t understand at the time why I felt such kinship with these strangers. A few months later, during my first trip to California, I began to understand. Uncle Jimmy flew Lindsay and me to his home in Napa, California. Knowing that I’d be visiting him, I told every person I could that I was headed to California in the summer and, what was more, flying for the first time. The main reaction was disbelief that my uncle had enough money to fly two people—neither of whom were his children—out to California. It is a testament to the class consciousness of my youth that my friends’ thoughts drifted first to the cost of an airplane flight. For my part, I was overjoyed to travel west and visit Uncle Jimmy, a man I idolized on par with my great-uncles, the Blanton men. Despite the early departure, I didn’t sleep a wink on the six-hour flight from Cincinnati to San Francisco. Everything was just too exciting: the way the earth shrank during takeoff, the look of clouds from close up, the scope and size of the sky, and the way the mountains looked from the stratosphere. The flight attendant took notice, and by the time we hit Colorado, I was making regular visits to the cockpit (this was before 9/11), where the pilot gave me brief lessons in flying an airplane and updated me on our progress. The adventure had just begun. I had traveled out of state before: I had joined my grandparents on road trips to South Carolina and Texas, and I visited Kentucky regularly. On those trips, I rarely spoke to anyone except family, and I never noticed anything all that different. Napa was like a different country. In California, every day included a new adventure with my teenage cousins and their friends.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  For all my grandma’s efforts, for all of her “You can do anything; don’t be like those fuckers who think the deck is stacked against them” diatribes, the message had only partially set in before I enlisted. Surrounding me was another message: that I and the people like me weren’t good enough; that the reason Middletown produced zero Ivy League graduates was some genetic or character defect. I couldn’t possibly see how destructive that mentality was until I escaped it. The Marine Corps replaced it with something else, something that loathes excuses. “Giving it my all” was a catchphrase, something heard in health or gym class. When I first ran three miles, mildly impressed with my mediocre twenty-five-minute time, a terrifying senior drill instructor greeted me at the finish line: “If you’re not puking, you’re lazy! Stop being fucking lazy!” He then ordered me to sprint between him and a tree repeatedly. Just as I felt I might pass out, he relented. I was heaving, barely able to catch my breath. “That’s how you should feel at the end of every run!” he yelled. In the Marines, giving it your all was a way of life. I’m not saying ability doesn’t matter. It certainly helps. But there’s something powerful about realizing that you’ve undersold yourself—that somehow your mind confused lack of effort for inability. This is why, whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class, I say, “The feeling that our choices don’t matter.” The Marine Corps excised that feeling like a surgeon does a tumor. A few days after my twenty-third birthday, I hopped into the first major purchase I’d ever made—an old Honda Civic—grabbed my discharge papers, and drove one last time from Cherry Point, North Carolina, to Middletown, Ohio. During my four years in the Marines, I had seen, in Haiti, a level of poverty I never knew existed. I witnessed the fiery aftermath of an airplane crash into a residential neighborhood. I had watched Mamaw die and then gone to war a few months later. I had befriended a former crack dealer who turned out to be the hardest-working marine I knew. When I joined the Marine Corps, I did so in part because I wasn’t ready for adulthood. I didn’t know how to balance a checkbook, much less how to complete the financial aid forms for college. Now I knew exactly what I wanted out of my life and how to get there. And in three weeks, I’d start classes at Ohio State. Chapter 11I arrived for orientation at Ohio State in early September 2007, and I couldn’t have been more excited. I remember every little detail about that day: lunch at Chipotle, the first time Lindsay had ever eaten there; the walk from the orientation building to the south campus house that would soon be my Columbus home; the beautiful weather.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  In the changing-room serious, hot No 6 were smoked, and soap, lathered in the cold, starlit water, eased the violence of cocks up young bums. Fox-eyed, silent but for our breathing and the thrilling, gross little rhythms of sex—which made us gulp and grope for more—we learnt our stuff. Then, noisier, enjoining each other to silence, we slid into the pool and swam through the underwater blackness where the cleaning device, humming faintly, swung round the sucking tentacle of its hose. On the dorm floor in the morning there were often dead leaves, or grassy lumps of mud, which we had brought in on our shoes in the small hours and which seemed mementoes of some Panic visitor. I told Phil all or some of this when he asked me about swimming, and showed him my Swimming-Pool Librarian badge (brass letters on red enamel, with a bendy brass pin) which, along with my preliminary lifesaving badge, I still had and kept in a round leather stud-box on my dressing-table. The box itself, aptly enough, was a gift from Johnny Carver, my great buddy and love at Winchester. Phil was round at my place for the first time, and it seemed to arouse a curiosity in him which had been almost abnormally absent before. ‘It smells so rich,’ he said. ‘That onion flan, yesterday—my old socks …’ I apologised. He was close enough to me now to laugh at anything. ‘No, no. I mean it smells expensive. Like a country house.’ I still dream, once a month or so, of that changing-room, its slatted floor and benches. In our retrogressive slang it was known as the Swimming-Pool Library and then simply as the Library, a notion fitting to the double lives we led. ‘I shall be in the library,’ I would announce, a prodigy of study. Sometimes I think that shadowy, doorless little shelter—which is all it was really, an empty, empty place—is where at heart I want to be. Beyond it was a wire fence and then a sloping, moonlit field of grass—‘the Wilderness’—that whispered and sighed in the night breeze. Nipping into that library of uncatalogued pleasure was to step into the dark and halt. Then held breath was released, a cigarette glowed, its smoke was smelled, the substantial blackness moved, glimmered and touched. Friendly hands felt for the flies. There was never, or rarely, any kissing—no cloying, adult impurity in the lubricious innocence of what we did. ‘Are you into kids?’ Phil asked. ‘I’m into you, darling.’ ‘Yeah, but …’ ‘You know it’s illegal, our affair. Officially, I can’t touch you for another three years.’ ‘Christ,’ he said, as if that altered everything, and paced around the room. ‘No, I think kids can be quite something.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  As much as I loved Ohio State and its people for an incredible education and experience, I could not put my fate in the hands of someone I didn’t know. I tried to talk myself into it. I even printed the form and drove it to campus. But when the time came, I crumpled it up and tossed it in the garbage. There would be no Stanford Law for J.D. I decided that I wanted to go to Yale more than any other school. It had a certain aura—with its small class sizes and unique grading system, Yale billed itself as a low-stress way to jump-start a legal career. But most of its students came from elite private colleges, not large state schools like mine, so I imagined that I had no chance of admission. Nonetheless, I submitted an application online, because that was relatively easy. It was late afternoon on an early spring day, 2010, when my phone rang and the caller ID revealed an unfamiliar 203 area code. I answered, and the voice on the other line told me that he was the director of admissions at Yale Law, and that I’d been admitted to the class of 2013. I was ecstatic and leaped around during the entire three-minute conversation. By the time he said goodbye, I was so out of breath that when I called Aunt Wee to tell her, she thought I’d just gotten into a car accident. I was sufficiently committed to going to Yale Law that I was willing to accept the two hundred thousand dollars or so in debt that I knew I’d accrue. Yet the financial aid package Yale offered exceeded my wildest dreams. In my first year, it was nearly a full ride. That wasn’t because of anything I’d done or earned—it was because I was one of the poorest kids in school. Yale offered tens of thousands in need-based aid. It was the first time being so broke paid so well. Yale wasn’t just my dream school, it was also the cheapest option on the table. The New York Times recently reported that the most expensive schools are paradoxically cheaper for low-income students. Take, for example, a student whose parents earn thirty thousand per year—not a lot of money but not poverty level, either. That student would pay ten thousand for one of the less selective branch campuses of the University of Wisconsin but would pay six thousand at the school’s flagship Madison campus. At Harvard, the student would pay only about thirteen hundred despite tuition of over forty thousand. Of course, kids like me don’t know this. My buddy Nate, a lifelong friend and one of the smartest people I know, wanted to go to the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, but he didn’t apply because he knew he couldn’t afford it. It likely would have cost him considerably less than Ohio State, just as Yale cost considerably less for me than any other school.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Lindsay had always been a beautiful girl. When my friends and I ranked the world’s prettiest girls, I listed Lindsay first, just ahead of Demi Moore and Pam Anderson. Lindsay had learned of a modeling recruitment event at a Dayton hotel, so Mom, Mamaw, Lindsay, and I piled into Mamaw’s Buick and headed north. Lindsay was bursting with excitement, and I was, too. This was going to be her big break and, by extension, our whole family’s. When we arrived at the hotel, a lady instructed us to follow signs to a giant ballroom and wait in line. The ballroom was perfectly tacky in that 1970s sort of way: ugly carpet, big chandeliers, and lighting just bright enough to prevent you from stumbling over your own feet. I wondered how any talent agent could ever appreciate my sister’s beauty. It was too damned dark. Eventually we reached the front of the line, and the talent agent seemed optimistic about my sister. She said something about how cute she was and told her to go wait in another room. Surprisingly, she said that I was model material, too, and asked if I’d like to follow my sister and hear about our next step. I agreed enthusiastically. After a little while in the holding room, Lindsay and I and the other selectees learned that we had made it to the next round, but another trial awaited us in New York City. The agency employees gave us brochures with more information and told us that we needed to RSVP within the next few weeks. On the way home, Lindsay and I were ecstatic. We were going to New York City to become famous models. The fee for traveling to New York was hefty, and if someone had really wanted us as models, they likely would have paid for our audition. In hindsight, the cursory treatment they gave each individual—each “audition” was no longer than a few-sentence conversation—suggests that the whole event was more scam than talent search. But I don’t know: Model audition protocol has never been my area of expertise. What I do know is that our exuberance didn’t survive the car ride. Mom began to worry aloud about the cost of the trip, causing Lindsay and me to bicker about which one of us should go (no doubt I was being a brat). Mom became progressively angrier and then snapped. What happened next was no surprise: There was a lot of screaming, some punching and driving, and then a stopped car on the side of the road, full of two sobbing kids. Mamaw intervened before things got out of hand, but it’s a miracle we didn’t crash and die: Mom driving and slapping the kids in the backseat; Mamaw on the passenger side, slapping and screaming at Mom. That was why the car stopped—though Mom was a multitasker, this was too much.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  I was twenty-one and had just moved to Brooklyn. I was wasted, floating back from a night at some West Village bar/club, waiting for the train that would take me to the L that would take me to my tiny room in East Williamsburg by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. There I would often fantasize about jumping from my lofted bed onto the wooden floor, hoping to injure myself just enough to get out of work but not enough to be hospitalized. I was a sandwich maker at a café for affluent people by the river. I sliced deli meats and spread harissa aioli and pickled beets until my calves ached, flecks of ham gathering in my bra, all to sustain an unpaid magazine internship and some weekend nights out where I hoped to have sex with someone rich enough to buy me drinks but not rich enough to fetishize my lifestyle. The bar/club, notorious for the horniness of its clientele, had not been fruitful that night. I had acquired the number of a jovial man who, to this day, is listed in my phone as “Greek the Club,” but I’d reached the point of the night where something shifted in me physically and moved me toward home. But swaying on the subway platform, a little past midnight, I caught eyes with a man across the tracks who seemed tall. I was still feeling flirty in my Forever 21 bandage skirt and disintegrating black combat boots, and he was clearly still feeling flirty in his, well, couldn’t see that far, there were two tracks between us and my contact lenses had expired years ago. But we waved at each other and alternated looking down coyly. Feeling bold, I mimed out my number with my hands—Four. Eight. Four—and he typed it into his phone. Just as I finished the last digit my train whooshed down the tracks, and I floated to the next station. When my service returned, I received his text and texted back my address, telling him to come over. He was a firefighter visiting a friend from out of town, I learned. As I trudged down Graham and my buzz continued its march toward exhaustion, I tucked my phone into my purse, acquired a bodega bacon egg and cheese, and slipped into bed with it. Twenty minutes later, brushing miscellany like assorted pencils and sandwich foil off my sheets, I spotted my phone lighting up out of the corner of my eye. “I’m here.” Who the hell? What? Ooooooohhhhhh. I peered out my street-level window and an entire human man was standing there. I didn’t recognize him. Then the night came trickling back like a cinematic montage of girls on Molly: lights, Greek the Club, Jägerbombs, Flo Rida, hobbling across Meatpacking cobblestones, subway, Four. Eight. Four.