Excitement

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Untrue (2018)

  Women lust and women cheat. And it sets us aflame. Shere Hite took a hit, received death threats, and eventually went into exile in Europe after suggesting that 70 percent of us do. Other statistics range from as low as 13 percent to as high as 50 percent of women admitting they have been unfaithful to a spouse or partner; many experts suggest the numbers might well be higher, given the asymmetrical, searing stigma attached to being a woman who admits it. Who, after all, wants to confess that she is untrue? What’s clear is that several decades after the great second wave of feminism, with increased autonomy and earning power and opportunity, and now with all manner of digital connections possible, women are, as sociologists like to put it, closing the infidelity gap. We’re just not talking about it. At least not in a voice above a whisper. “I don’t think you really even want to talk to me, because I’m really—unusual…” most of the women I’ve spoken with begin by saying when we meet to talk. Why’s that? I wonder. “Because I have a really strong libido. And—I don’t think I’m cut out for monogamy,” they tell me, haltingly, one after another. We chat over coffee, in person, or on the phone. They fear they are going to “throw the data” with their freakish singularity. They think they are outliers. They are foreign to the tribe of women, they suggest and believe. But when woman after woman in a committed relationship tells you she is unusual, sexually speaking—because she wants more sex than she’s supposed to, because she feels compelled or tempted to stray—you can’t shake the feeling that in matters of female desire, sexuality, and monogamy in particular, “unusual” is normal, and “normal” desperately needs to be redefined.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  To speak further of attire, an incident from which portents were drawn occurred during the year of my tribuneship in Rome. One day of appallingly bad weather, when I was to deliver a public address, I had mislaid my mantle of heavy Gallic wool. Protected only by my toga, which caught the water in its gutterlike folds, I had continually to wipe the rain from my eyes as I pronounced my discourse. Catching cold is an emperor's privilege in Rome, since he is forbidden, regardless of weather, to put anything over the toga: from that day on, every huckster and melon vendor believed in my approaching good fortune. We talk much of the dreams of youth. Too often we forget its scheming. That, too, is a form of dream, and is no less extravagant than the others. I was not the only one to indulge in such calculations throughout that period of Roman festivities; the whole army rushed into the race for honors. I broke gaily enough into the role of ambitious politician, but I have never been able to play it for long with conviction, or without need of constant help from a prompter. I was willing to carry out with utmost conscientiousness the tiresome duty of recorder of senatorial proceedings; I knew what services would count most. The laconic style of the emperor, though admirable for the armies, did not suffice for Rome; the empress, whose literary tastes were akin to mine, persuaded him to let me compose his speeches. This was the first of the good offices of Plotina. I succeeded all the better for having had practice in that kind of accommodation: in the difficult period of my apprenticeship I had often written harangues for senators who were short of ideas or turns of phrase; they ended by thinking themselves the authors of these pieces. In working thus for Trajan, I took exactly the same delight as that afforded by the rhetorical exercises of my youth; alone in my room, trying out my effects before a mirror, I felt myself an emperor. In truth I was learning to be one; audacities of which I should not have dreamed myself capable became easy when someone else would have to shoulder them. The emperor's thinking was simple but inarticulate, and therefore obscure; it became quite familiar to me, and I flattered myself that I knew it somewhat better than he did.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I told him if he wanted to wrestle me and beat me on the floor of the convention hall in front of all those cameras he could. By then a couple of newsmen, including Roger Mudd from CBS, had worked their way through the security barricades and begun to ask me questions. “Why are you here tonight?” Roger Mudd asked me. “But don’t start talking until I get the camera here,” he shouted. It was too good to be true. In a few seconds Roger Mudd and I would be going on live all over the country. I would be doing what I had come here for, showing the whole nation what the war was all about. The camera began to roll, and I began to explain why I and the others had come, that the war was wrong and it had to stop immediately. “I’m a Vietnam veteran,” I said. “I gave America my all and the leaders of this government threw me and the others away to rot in their V.A. hospitals. What’s happening in Vietnam is a crime against humanity, and I just want the American people to know that we have come all the way across this country, sleeping on the ground and in the rain, to let the American people see for themselves the men who fought their war and have come to oppose it. If you can’t believe the veteran who fought the war and was wounded in the war, who can you believe?” “Thank you,” said Roger Mudd, visibly moved by what I had said. “This is Roger Mudd,” he said, “down on the convention floor with Ron Kovic, a disabled veteran protesting President Nixon’s policy in Vietnam.” The security agents were frantically trying to stop other cameras from getting through and later I was to learn that Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler had almost flipped out when he heard Mudd had interviewed me and it had gone nationwide for almost two minutes. By this time a few other veterans had managed to get into the hall. One of them came to tell me that my old friend Bobby Muller and Bill Wieman, a double amputee, had gotten passes from Congressman McCloskey and had managed to get into the center aisle in direct line with the podium almost two hundred feet back. “Get me up there quick,” I said. He turned me around and wheeled me toward the back past the smiling security officers who must have thought I was leaving. What are you smiling at? I thought to myself. I’m just warming up. “There, up there,” the vet said, pointing to the front of the aisle where Bobby and Bill were sitting in their wheelchairs. “Where you been?” Wieman said to me, as I shook their hands. “I’ve been over there,” I said, pointing to the other aisle.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I put my hand on his shoulder before announcing to the court that Myers could be excused. We had no further questions. Myers stood up to leave the courtroom. As the deputies led him to a side door, he looked apologetically at Walter before being escorted out. I’m not sure Walter saw him. People in the courtroom started whispering again. I heard one of Walter’s relatives, in a muted tone, say, “Thank you, Jesus!” The next challenge was to rebut the testimony of Bill Hooks and Joe Hightower, who had claimed to see Walter’s modified “low-rider” truck pulling out from the cleaners about the time Ronda Morrison was murdered. I called Clay Kast to the stand. The white mechanic testified that McMillian’s truck was not a low-rider in November 1986 when Ronda Morrison was murdered. Kast had records and clearly remembered modifying Walter’s truck in May 1987, over six months after the day when Hooks and Hightower claimed they’d seen a low-rider truck at the cleaners. We finished the day with Woodrow Ikner, a Monroeville police officer who testified that he was the first on the scene and that the body of Ronda Morrison was not where Myers had testified it was. Ikner said it was clear from his observation of the murder scene that Morrison had been shot in the back after a struggle that had started in the bathroom and ended in the rear of the cleaners, where the body was found. Ikner’s description of the scene contradicted the assertion that Myers had made at trial about seeing Morrison near the front counter. More significantly, Ikner testified that he’d been asked by Pearson, the trial prosecutor, to testify that Morrison’s body had been dragged through the store from the front counter to the spot where it was found. Ikner was indignant on the stand as he recalled the conversation. He knew that such testimony would be false and had told the prosecutors that he refused to lie. He was soon after discharged from the police department. Evidentiary hearings, like jury trials, can be exhausting. I had done the direct examination of all of the witnesses and was surprised when I realized that it was already 5:00 P.M. The hearing was going well. I was excited and energized to be able, finally, to lay out all of the evidence proving Walter’s innocence. I kept an eye on Judge Norton to make sure he was still engaged, and he seemed visibly affected by the proceedings. I believed the concerned look on his face revealed confusion about what he was going to do in light of this evidence, and I considered the judge’s newfound confusion and concern to be real progress.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He looked up ahead to where the lieutenant who had come along with them that night was standing. The lieutenant had sent one of the men, Molina, on across the rice dikes almost to the edge of the village. The cold rain was still coming down very hard and the men behind him were standing like a line of statues waiting for the next command. But now something was wrong up ahead. He could see Molina waving his hands excitedly trying to tell the lieutenant something. Stumbling over the dikes, almost crawling, Molina came back toward the lieutenant. He saw him whisper something in his ear. And now the lieutenant turned and looked at him. “Sergeant,” he said, “Molina and I are going to get a look up ahead. Stay here with the team.” Balancing on the dike, he turned around slowly after the lieutenant had gone, motioning with his rifle for all of the men in back of him to get down. Each one, carefully, one after the other, squatted along the dike on one knee, waiting in the rain to move out again. They were all shivering from the cold. They waited for what seemed a long time and then the lieutenant and Molina appeared suddenly through the darkness. He could tell from their faces that they had seen something. They had seen something up ahead, he was sure, and they were going to tell him what they had just seen. He stood up, too excited to stay kneeling down on the dike. “What is it?” he cried. “Be quiet,” whispered the lieutenant sharply, grabbing his arm, almost throwing him into the paddy. He began talking very quickly and much louder than he should have. “I think we found them. I think we found them,” he repeated, almost shouting. He didn’t know what the lieutenant meant. “What?” he said. “The sappers, the sappers! Let’s go!” The lieutenant was taking over now. He seemed very sure of himself, he was acting very confident. “Let’s go, goddamn it!” He clicked his rifle off safety and got his men up quickly, urging them forward, following the lieutenant and Molina toward the edge of the village. They ran through the paddy, splashing like a family of ducks. This time he hoped and prayed it would be the real enemy. He would be ready for them this time. Here was another chance, he thought. He was so excited he ran straight into the lieutenant, bouncing clumsily off his chest. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “Quiet! They’re out there,” the lieutenant whispered to him, motioning to the rest of the men to get down on their hands and knees now. They crawled to the tree line, then along the back of the rice paddy through almost a foot of water, until the whole team lay in a long line pressed up against the dike, facing the village.

• From Untrue (2018)

  The “Infidelity Workaround”Like Chivers and Meana, Alicia Walker—an assistant professor of sociology at Missouri State University—does research that forces us to rethink not only female sexuality but our most cherished and basic beliefs about what women do and are, what they want and how they behave, and the role that context plays. In her extensive review of the sociological and psychological studies on female infidelity, and her own study of forty-six female users of the Ashley Madison website before its infamous hack and shutdown in 2015 (“Life is short. Have an affair,” the company’s tagline suggested), Walker explodes several of our most dearly held notions about female infidelity: that women cheat only when they are unhappy in their marriages; that unlike men, they seek emotional connection, not sexual gratification, from affairs; and that like Diane Lane’s character in Unfaithful, who literally falls and skins her knee, thus attracting the attention of the man with whom she has tryst after hot tryst, women “just” stumble into affairs. For Walker’s cohort, this was no case of having one too many at the holiday party and then somehow sleeping with a coworker. “These women weren’t just falling into it or seeking out companionship,” Walker told me flatly when we spoke on the phone one morning after she had bustled her daughter off to school. Walker, who has blonde hair, favors red lipstick, and speaks with a touch of a Southern drawl, is well aware that her findings demolish certain familiar stereotypes. She is also conscious of the profound discomfort this might cause and more than once told me she hoped that readers of the book she wrote based on her study of female infidelity, The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife, would not shoot the messenger as they took in just how different women who commit infidelity are from our comforting clichés about them. But her email signature includes a quote from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, one she lives: “My goal is to contribute to preventing people from being able to utter all kinds of nonsense about the social world.” Walker wanted me to know that the women she interviewed were funny, smart, and insightful, and most of all, they struck her as very normal. They worked quiet jobs and enjoyed being mothers, having friendly conversations with neighbors, and, in some cases, going to church. They were also dead set on having affairs.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  If the letter ended here, this older interpretation—that Paul thinks that everybody, Jew and gentile, has to be “Christian” to be saved—would be more compelling. But the letter does not end here. Paul’s argument surges ahead in chapter 11, where he puts the question at its most pointed: “Has God then rejected his people?” The question, again, is rhetorical (“Of course not!” 11.1). God “has not rejected his people whom he foreknew.” He works by freely choosing a remnant for himself. “So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace” (11.5; Paul had pointed to himself as obviously a member of this group, 11.1): chosenness means election (11.7). What of all the rest of Israel? They are hardened, but it is God who hardened them (11.7–10). Why? Paul’s language here resonates with his earlier reference to the story of Pharaoh (Rm 9.17). Once again, God has “hardened” someone—in this case, most of Israel—for the same reason that he had once hardened Pharaoh: so “that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.” When will his name be so proclaimed? When his son returns (11.26), when the kingdom comes—which means, for Paul, very soon: “If their being cast off means the reconciliation of the cosmos, what will their reception mean, if not life from the dead!” (11.15, obviously a reference to impending end-time events). In his excitement Paul continues, mixing metaphors (foot races, dough, olive trees) as he tries to explain God’s plan. Israel is still very much in “the race.” Their divinely induced “stumbling” did not disqualify them (11.11); rather, it was God’s strategy in order to bring “riches to the gentiles”—namely, salvation in Christ (11.12). The part of the dough that a Jew brings to God is holy, and it sanctifies all of the dough (an allusion to offering first fruits to priests, 11.16). The root and the trunk of the cultivated olive are still holy, even if some branches have been knocked off to make room for wild olive grafts (11.17–24; Do not boast about this, he cautions his gentile hearers: the knocked-off “Jewish” branches will be grafted back into the tree.) Paul then comes to his point: I do not want you to be ignorant of this musterion, brothers, lest you think that you are wise. A hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the pleroma of the gentiles comes in, so that all of Israel will be saved, as it is written: “Out of Zion will come the Deliverer; he will banish ungodliness from Jacob. And this will be my covenant with them, when I take away their sins.” (Rm 11.25–27)29

• From Untrue (2018)

  An effervescent blonde standing near us told me she was from a ritzy town in Florida and that this was not her first Skirt Club party. It was her fifth, and it had worked perfectly with her schedule, since she was in town for Gala Season. This was a socialite with a difference. Her breasts strained against the plunging neckline of her tight nude pleather dress. She asked me, sotto voce, why all the women were wearing stockings and garter belts. Was that a New York thing? Like her, I was bare legged, and didn’t have an answer. Soon, a special guest with the Instagram handle “KissmedeadlyDoll” was giving us tips on shibari—Japanese bondage—using a willing, appealing blonde in a red velvet dress as her “victim.” “If you are going to use the rope on someone’s neck, be sure to either go high or go low. Never across the Adam’s apple area,” the raven-haired expert instructed. She stretched the rope across the blonde, bound twentysomething’s crotch. Then she attached a vibrator to the rope high on her victim’s back and turned it on, sending her into a paroxysm of pleasure as the sensation vibrated all the way down. At this point in the proceedings, I thought of myself as part of a slightly surreal Tupperware party. The fact that so many attractive women were sitting around nearly naked did very little to offset the sense that we were a group of women participating in the tradition of politely watching a demonstration of a household accoutrement (albeit a kinky one) in someone’s living room.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  We discovered that Bill Hooks had been paid by Sheriff Tate for his testimony against Walter—we found checks in the county’s financial records showing close to $5,000 in payments to Hooks in reward money and “expenses.” Sheriff Tate had also paid Hooks money to travel back and forth out of the county around the time of the trial. This information should have been disclosed to Walter’s counsel prior to trial so that they could have used it to cast doubt on the credibility of Hooks’s testimony. We also found out that Hooks had been released from jail immediately after giving the police his statement that he’d seen Walter’s “low-rider” truck at the cleaners on the day of the murder. We found court records revealing that the D.A. and the sheriff, who are county officials, had somehow gotten city charges and fines against Hooks dismissed, even though they had no authority in city courts. Under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, that Hooks had charges against him dismissed in exchange for cooperation with authorities was information that the State was obligated to reveal to the defense. But, of course, they hadn’t. We found the white man who was running the store on the day that Ralph Myers came in for the purpose of giving a note to Walter. Walter had tried to persuade his original lawyers to speak to this man, but they had failed to do so. After Walter described the location of the store, we were able to track him down. The storeowner recounted his memory of that day: Myers had sought out Walter—but had to ask the storeowner which of the several black men in the store was Walter McMillian. Months after the crime, the storeowner was adamant that Myers had never seen Walter McMillian before. In a church basement, Walter’s sister found flyers advertising the fish fry held at Walter’s house; they confirmed that the event had taken place on the same day as the Morrison murder. A white storeowner who had no relationship to Walter or his family had kept a copy of that flyer for some reason, and he confirmed that he had received it before the Morrison murder. We even tracked down Clay Kast, the white mechanic who had modified Walter’s truck and converted it to a low-rider. He confirmed that the work had been done over six months after Ronda Morrison was murdered. This proved that McMillian’s truck had had no modifications or special features and therefore could not have been the truck described by Myers and Hooks at the trial. I was feeling very good about the progress we were making when I got a call that would become the most significant break in the case. The voice said, “Mr.

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

  We had a very Tom and Jerry relationship, me and my mom. She was the strict disciplinarian; I was naughty as shit. She would send me out to buy groceries, and I wouldn’t come right home because I’d be using the change from the milk and bread to play arcade games at the supermarket. I loved videogames. I was a master at Street Fighter. I could go forever on a single play. I’d drop a coin in, time would fly, and the next thing I knew there’d be a woman behind me with a belt. It was a race. I’d take off out the door and through the dusty streets of Eden Park, clambering over walls, ducking through backyards. It was a normal thing in our neighborhood. Everybody knew: That Trevor child would come through like a bat out of hell, and his mom would be right there behind him. She could go at a full sprint in high heels, but if she really wanted to come after me she had this thing where she’d kick her shoes off while still going at top speed. She’d do this weird move with her ankles and the heels would go flying and she wouldn’t even miss a step. That’s when I knew, Okay, she’s in turbo mode now. When I was little she always caught me, but as I got older I got faster, and when speed failed her she’d use her wits. If I was about to get away she’d yell, “Stop! Thief!” She’d do this to her own child. In South Africa, nobody gets involved in other people’s business—unless it’s mob justice, and then everybody wants in. So she’d yell “Thief!” knowing it would bring the whole neighborhood out against me, and then I’d have strangers trying to grab me and tackle me, and I’d have to duck and dive and dodge them as well, all the while screaming, “I’m not a thief! I’m her son!” The last thing I wanted to do that Sunday morning was climb into some crowded minibus, but the second I heard my mom say sun’qhela I knew my fate was sealed. She gathered up Andrew and we climbed out of the Volkswagen and went out to try to catch a ride. — I was five years old, nearly six, when Nelson Mandela was released from prison. I remember seeing it on TV and everyone being happy. I didn’t know why we were happy, just that we were. I was aware of the fact that there was a thing called apartheid and it was ending and that was a big deal, but I didn’t understand the intricacies of it. What I do remember, what I will never forget, is the violence that followed. The triumph of democracy over apartheid is sometimes called the Bloodless Revolution. It is called that because very little white blood was spilled. Black blood ran in the streets.

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

  We’d moved to Highlands North when my stepfather’s garage went out of business, and he moved his workshop to the house. We had a big yard and a garage in the back, and that became his new workshop, essentially. At any given time, we had at least ten or fifteen cars in the driveway, in the yard, and out on the street, clients’ cars being worked on and old junkers Abel kept around to tinker with. One afternoon Tom and I were at the house. Tom was telling Abel about my date, and Abel decided to be generous. He said I could take a car for the dance. There was a red Mazda that we’d had for a while, a complete piece of shit but it worked well enough. I’d borrowed it before, but the car I really wanted was Abel’s BMW. It was old and beat-up like the Mazda, but a shit BMW is still a BMW. I begged him to let me take it. “Please, please, can I use the BMW?” “Not a fucking chance.” “Please. This is the greatest moment in my life. Please. I’m begging you.” “No.” “Please.” “No. You can take the Mazda.” Tom, always the hustler and the dealmaker, stepped in. “Bra Abie,” he said. “I don’t think you understand. If you saw the girl Trevor is taking to the dance, you would see why this is so important. Let’s make a deal. If we bring her here and she’s the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen in your life, you’ll let him take the BMW.” Abel thought about it. “Okay. Deal.” We went to Babiki’s flat, told her my parents wanted to meet her, and brought her back to my house. Then we brought her around to the garage in the back where Abel and his guys were working. Tom and I went over and introduced them. “Abel, this is Babiki. Babiki, this is Abel.” Abel smiled big, was charming as always. “Nice to meet you,” he said. They chatted for a few minutes. Tom and Babiki left. Abel turned to me. “Is that the girl?” “Yes.” “You can take the BMW.” Once I had the car, I desperately needed something to wear. I was taking out this girl who was really into fashion, and, except for my Timberlands, everything I owned was shit. I was limited in my wardrobe choices because I was stuck buying in the shops my mother let me go to, and my mother did not believe in spending money on clothes. She’d take me to some bargain clothing store and tell me what our budget was, and I’d have to find something to wear.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  There’s never been anything like this, M. said then, I mean maybe in 1989 but nothing I’ve ever seen. Something’s really happening, I feel like I’m part of something, not just here but something bigger. It’s the same as what’s happening in Taksim Square, in Brazil, the Arab Spring, something is happening, something real, I think there’s a chance for things really to change. I felt this too, it wasn’t to challenge her that I asked what she thought that change would be. She shrugged. I’m not sure, she said, but I feel like we’ll figure it out. She paused. I feel powerful in a way I never have before, she said, and then she glanced at me and laughed, I feel like one of the opalchentsi on Shipka. These were Bulgarian volunteers who fought with the Russians against the Ottomans, there was a poem about them by Ivan Vazov that every Bulgarian knew; I had heard a poet declaim it once, drunk at a dinner party, the room quiet with reverence. I feel the power of the people, she said gingerly, cringing at the cliché. Then she laughed again, pointing, and I saw that ahead of us a group of women were dancing on the sidewalk, their hair wet, their sundresses clinging to their bodies, and several stories above them an elderly man, shirtless and bald, his skin hanging loose around his frame, held a garden hose, pointing it up and half blocking the end with his thumb so that water fell down like rain. It was his gift to us, a chance to cool down, though most of the marchers avoided it, leaving it to the young women, who would be cold soon enough; the heat was fading, even on warm days the nights could be cool. It was an instant allegory, youth and age, Hephaestus and the Graces. And then my mind shuffled to the side a step and I thought of the water cannons in Taksim Square, of the luck that had held here so far. M. turned her head as we passed them, then looked back at me, smiling. My parents don’t like that I come, she said, they don’t like the government but they’re afraid of violence, they’re afraid I’ll get in trouble with the police. But it’s not like that at all, she said, people aren’t angry, there’s so much joy here, she said, they don’t understand that, have you ever seen so much joy? It makes me wish I weren’t leaving, she went on, my whole life I’ve been dying to get out of here and now I feel like I want to stay. This made me remember the taxi driver and what he had said about the Changes, how he had wasted his life for an idealism that had curdled, but I didn’t say this, I put my arm around her and squeezed her shoulder, another breach of decorum. I mean, look at that, she said after I dropped my arm, and she pointed at a sign being carried by a man just in front of us. The crowd had bunched and slowed as people climbed the stairs that led from the boulevard up to the plaza at NDK. I almost never came to NDK this way, I always circled around to the other side. I only climbed these stairs once a year, I realized, for the Pride march, when the organizers used the stairs for a security check; we opened our bags and showed our IDs and had colored plastic bands attached to our wrists, so that the police could tell us apart from the protesters who would line our path. M. was pointing at a poster that showed a bearded man’s face, and beneath it in block letters the name Vazov, the writer who had given M. her opalchentsi, and beside that another face, this one labeled Botev, another beloved poet. There was a whole group of them marching together, each with the face of a writer: there were Elin Pelin and Petko Slaveykov, and my favorite of the classic writers, Yordan Yovkov, the most elegant, he should be better known in English. Isn’t that beautiful, M. said, tell me, where else do they march with their poets, and I had to admit that I didn’t know, certainly not in America, I said, that’s something you would never see there, and she smiled, I could see this gratified her.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  We set ambushes, then led gallant attacks, storming over the top, bayonetting and shooting anyone who got in our way. Then we’d walk out of the woods like the heroes we knew we would become when we were men. The army had a show on Channel 2 called “The Big Picture,” and after it was over Castiglia and I crawled all over the back yard playing guns and army, making commando raids all summer into Ackerman’s housing project blasting away at the imaginary enemy we had created right before our eyes, throwing dirt bombs and rocks into the windows, making loud explosions like hand grenades with our voices then charging in with our Matty Mattel machine guns blazing. I bandaged up the German who was still alive and had Castiglia question him as I threw a couple more grenades, killing even more Germans. We went on countless missions and patrols together around my back yard, attacking Ackerman’s housing project with everything from bazookas to flamethrowers and baseball bats. We studied the Marine Corps Guidebook and Richie brought over some beautiful pamphlets with very sharp-looking marines on the covers. We read them in my basement for hours and just as we dreamed of playing for the Yankees someday, we dreamed of becoming United States Marines and fighting our first war and we made a solemn promise that year that the day we turned seventeen we were both going down to the marine recruiter at the shopping center in Levittown and signing up for the United States Marine Corps. We joined the cub scouts and marched in parades on Memorial Day. We made contingency plans for the cold war and built fallout shelters out of milk cartons. We wore spacesuits and space helmets. We made rocket ships out of cardboard boxes. And one Saturday afternoon in the basement Castiglia and I went to Mars on the couch we had turned into a rocket ship. We read books about the moon and Wernher von Braun. And the whole block watched a thing called the space race begin. On a cold October night Dad and I watched the first satellite, called Sputnik , moving across the sky above our house like a tiny bright star. I still remember standing out there with Dad looking up in amazement at that thing moving in the sky above Massapequa. It was hard to believe that this thing, this Sputnik , was so high up and moving so fast around the world, again and again. Dad put his hand on my shoulder that night and without saying anything I quietly walked back inside and went to my room thinking that the Russians had beaten America into space and wondering why we couldn’t even get a rocket off the pad. It seemed that whole school year we talked about nothing but rockets and how they would break away into stages and blast their satellites into outer space.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  It was beautiful, just like the movies. The firing first started in the graveyard. There were loud cracks, and then the whole thing sounded like someone had set off a whole string of fireworks. He could hear the mortars popping out, crashing like cymbals when they landed on top of the ’tracs. The whole graveyard was being raked by mortars and heavy machine-gun fire coming out of the village. * * * I remember we all sort of stopped and watched for a moment. Then all of a sudden the cracks were blasting all around our heads and everybody was running all over the place. We started firing back with full automatics. I emptied a whole clip into the pagoda and the village. I was yelling to the men. I kept telling them to hold their ground and keep firing, though no one knew what we were firing at. I looked to my left flank and all the men were gone. They had run away, all run away to the trees near the river, and I yelled and cursed at them to come back but nobody came. I kept emptying everything I had into the village, blasting holes through the pagoda and ripping bullets into the tree line. There was someone to my right lying on the ground still firing. I had started walking toward the village when the first bullet hit me. There was a sound like firecrackers going off all around my feet. Then a real loud crack and my leg went numb below the knee. I looked down at my foot and there was blood at the back of it. The bullet had come through the front and blew out nearly the whole of my heel. I had been shot. The war had finally caught up with my body. I felt good inside. Finally the war was with me and I had been shot by the enemy. I was getting out of the war and I was going to be a hero. I kept firing my rifle into the tree line and boldly, with my new wound, moved closer to the village, daring them to hit me again. For a moment I felt like running back to the rear with my new million-dollar wound but I decided to keep fighting out in the open. A great surge of strength went through me as I yelled for the other men to come out from the trees and join me. I was limping now and the foot was beginning to hurt so much, I finally lay down in almost a kneeling position, still firing into the village, still unable to see anyone. I seemed to be the only one left firing a rifle. Someone came up from behind me, took off my boot and began to bandage my foot. The whole thing was incredibly stupid, we were sitting ducks, but he bandaged my foot and then he took off back into the tree line.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Most of us live the greater part of our lives submerged. Certainly in my own case I can say that not until I left America did I emerge above the surface. Perhaps America had nothing to do with it, but the fact remains that I did not open my eyes wide and full and clear until I struck Paris. And perhaps that was only because I had renounced America, renounced my past. My friend Kronski used to twit me about my “euphorias.” It was a sly way he had of reminding me, when I was extraordinarily gay, that the morrow would find me depressed. It was true. I had nothing but ups and downs. Long stretches of gloom and melancholy followed by extravagant bursts of gaiety, of trancelike inspiration. Never a level in which I was myself. It sounds strange to say so, yet I was never myself. I was either anonymous or the person called Henry Miller raised to the nth degree. In the latter mood, for instance, I could spill out a whole book to Hymie while riding a trolley car. Hymie, who never suspected me of being anything but a good employment manager. I can see his eyes now as he looked at me one night when I was in one of my states of “euphoria.” We had boarded the trolley at the Brooklyn Bridge to go to some flat in Greenpoint where a couple of trollops were waiting to receive us. Hymie had started to talk to me in his usual way about his wife’s ovaries. In the first place he didn’t know precisely what ovaries meant and so I was explaining it to him in crude and simple fashion. In the midst of my explanation it suddenly seemed so profoundly tragic and ridiculous that Hymie shouldn’t know what ovaries were that I became drunk, as drunk I mean as if I had had a quart of whisky under my belt. From the idea of diseased ovaries there germinated in one lightning-like flash a sort of tropical growth made up of the most heterogeneous assortment of odds and ends in the midst of which, securely lodged, tenaciously lodged, I might say, were Dante and Shakespeare. At the same instant I also suddenly recalled my whole private train of thought which had begun about the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge and which suddenly the word “ovaries” had broken. I realized that everything Hymie had said up till the word “ovaries” had sieved through me like sand. What I had begun, in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, was what I had begun time and time again in the past, usually when walking to my father’s shop, a performance which was repeated day in and day out as if in a trance. What I had begun, in brief, was a book of the hours, of the tedium and monotony of my life in the midst of a ferocious activity.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It got him so badly that he had to stop and hold his guts; the tears were streaming down his eyes and between the cackles he let out the most terrible, heartrending sobs. “I knew you would do me good,” he blurted out, as the last outbreak died away. “I always said you were a crazy son of a bitch. . . . You’re a Jew bastard yourself, only you don’t know it. . . . Now tell me, you bastard, how was it yesterday? Did you get your end in? Didn’t I tell you she was a good lay? And do you know who she’s living with? Jesus, you were lucky you didn’t get caught. She’s living with a Russian poet—you know the guy, too. I introduced you to him once at the Café Royal. Better not let him get wind of it. He’ll beat your brains out . . . and then hell write a beautiful poem about it and send it to her with a bunch of roses. Sure, I knew him out in Stelton, in the anarchist colony. His old man was a Nihilist. The whole family’s crazy. By the way, you’d better take care of yourself. I meant to tell you that the other day, but I didn’t think you would act so quickly. You know she may have syphilis. I’m not trying to scare you. I’m just telling you for your own good. . . .” This outburst seemed to really assuage him. He was trying to tell me in his twisted Jewish way that he liked me. To do so he had to first destroy everything around me—the wife, the job, my friends, the “nigger wench,” as he called Valeska, and so on. “I think some day you’re going to be a great writer,” he said. “But,” he added maliciously, “first you’ll have to suffer a bit. I mean really suffer, because you don’t know what the word means yet. You only think you’ve suffered. You’ve got to fall in love first. That nigger wench now . . . you don’t really suppose that you’re in love with her, do you? Did you ever take a good look at her ass . . . how it’s spreading, I mean? In five years she’ll look like Aunt Jemima. You’ll make a swell couple walking down the avenue with a string of pickaninnies trailing behind you. Jesus, I’d rather see you marry a Jewish girl. You wouldn’t appreciate her, of course, but she’d be good for you. You need something to steady yourself. You’re scattering your energies. Listen, why do you run around with all these dumb bastards you pick up? You seem to have a genius for picking up the wrong people. Why don’t you throw yourself into something useful? You don’t belong in that job—you could be a big guy somewhere. Maybe a labor leader . . . I don’t know what exactly.

• 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 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)

  And when the stairs stop squeaking I gently open the door and sally out, and then by God I have a real fright because if that black buck ever finds out I’ll have my throat slit and no mistake about it. And so I stop giving lessons at that joint, but soon the daughter is after me—just turning sixteen—and won’t I come and give her lessons at a friend’s house? We begin the Czerny exercises all over again, sparks and everything. It’s the first smell of fresh cunt I’ve had, and it’s wonderful, like newmown hay. We fuck our way through one lesson after another and in between lessons we do a little extra fucking. And then one day it’s the sad story—she’s knocked up and what to do about it? I have to get a Jewboy to help me out, and he wants twenty-five bucks for the job and I’ve never seen twenty-five bucks in my life. Besides, she’s under age. Besides, she might have blood poisoning. I give him five bucks on account and beat it to the Adirondacks for a couple of weeks. In the Adirondacks I meet a schoolteacher who’s dying to take lessons. More velocity exercises, more condoms and conundrums. Every time I touched the piano I seemed to shake a cunt loose. If there was a party I had to bring the fucking music roll along; to me it was just like wrapping my penis in a handkerchief and slinging it under my arm. In vacation time, at a farmhouse or an inn, where there was always a surplus of cunt, the music had an extraordinary effect. Vacation time was a period I looked forward to the whole year, not because of the cunts so much as because it meant no work. Once out of harness I became a clown. I was so chock-full of energy that I wanted to jump out of my skin. I remember one summer in the Catskills meeting a girl named Francie. She was beautiful and lascivious, with strong Scotch teats and a row of white even teeth that was dazzling. It began in the river where we were swimming. We were holding on to the boat and one of her boobies had slipped out of bounds. I slipped the other one out for her and then I undid the shoulder straps. She ducked under the boat coyly and I followed and as she was coming up for air I wiggled the bloody bathing suit off her and there she was floating like a mermaid with her big strong teats bobbing up and down like bloated corks. I wriggled out of my tights and we began playing like dolphins under the side of the boat. In a little while her girl friend came along in a canoe. She was a rather hefty girl, a sort of strawberry blonde with agate-colored eyes and full of freckles.

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

  Anytime my extra energy wasn’t burned off, it would find its way into general naughtiness and misbehavior. I prided myself on being the ultimate prankster. Every teacher at school used overhead projectors to put their notes up on the wall during class. One day I went around and took the magnifying glass out of every projector in every classroom. Another time I emptied a fire extinguisher into the school piano, because I knew we were going to have a performance at assembly the next day. The pianist sat down and played the first note and, foomp!, all this foam exploded out of the piano. The two things I loved most were fire and knives. I was endlessly fascinated by them. Knives were just cool. I collected them from pawnshops and garage sales: flick knives, butterfly knives, the Rambo knife, the Crocodile Dundee knife. Fire was the ultimate, though. I loved fire and I especially loved fireworks. We celebrated Guy Fawkes Day in November, and every year my mom would buy us a ton of fireworks, like a mini-arsenal. I realized that I could take the gunpowder out of all the fireworks and create one massive firework of my own. One afternoon I was doing precisely that, goofing around with my cousin and filling an empty plant pot with a huge pile of gunpowder, when I got distracted by some Black Cat firecrackers. The cool thing you could do with a Black Cat was, instead of lighting it to make it explode, you could break it in half and light it and it would turn into a mini-flamethrower. I stopped midway through building my gunpowder pile to play with the Black Cats and somehow dropped a match into the pile. The whole thing exploded, throwing a massive ball of flame up in my face. Mlungisi screamed, and my mom came running into the yard in a panic. “What happened?!” I played it cool, even though I could still feel the heat of the fireball on my face. “Oh, nothing. Nothing happened.” “Were you playing with fire?!” “No.” She shook her head. “You know what? I would beat you, but Jesus has already exposed your lies.” “Huh?” “Go to the bathroom and look at yourself.” I went to the toilet and looked in the mirror. My eyebrows were gone and the front inch or so of my hair was completely burned off. From an adult’s point of view, I was destructive and out of control, but as a child I didn’t think of it that way. I never wanted to destroy. I wanted to create. I wasn’t burning my eyebrows. I was creating fire. I wasn’t breaking overhead projectors. I was creating chaos, to see how people reacted.