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 Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I felt I’d stayed in one place for a very long time—I’d never lived more than a few miles from my parents’ house except for the years when I was in Vietnam. For a while I thought of taking another trip to Mexico, but then just before Christmas my friend Kenny came home from California and asked me if I wanted to drive back across with him and live out there. I jumped at the idea of going. California seemed like such a warm and beautiful place, another planet. I cleaned my whole apartment out in one Sunday afternoon and gave all the furniture I owned to Mom and Dad. My car was packed that night and the next morning Kenny and I were on the road. Three days later we’d gotten all the way to Texas. It was New Year’s Eve. We celebrated it in a bar in Longview shooting a game of pool. The next day we got up early and drove straight through to Las Cruces, New Mexico. I remember big bramble bushes blowing in front of the car and dust all over everything. I wanted to push straight on to L.A., but Kenny and I hadn’t eaten more than a few sandwiches in the last few days and we needed a good night’s sleep. We stopped at a motel overnight and had a big breakfast of hot coffee and scrambled eggs before we started driving again. Even Kenny got excited later that afternoon when we passed the Great Salt Lake. He took the car the rest of the way in and I sat by the open window watching the orange groves and green trees begin to appear as we came out of the desert. It’s California, I kept saying to myself, it’s California. It got dark just as we came into L.A. and the lights went on all over the sprawling city like flickering little candles. No matter what Kenny or anybody said to me, this was Paradise, and like the pioneers before me I was going to make it my home. We got to Heliotrope Avenue and parked the car in front of Kenny’s house. We went into his tiny apartment, turned the air conditioner on and fell asleep exhausted. We rented a larger apartment down by the ocean later that week, and after a while Kenny quit school. We hung out together all the time. It was so good to be with someone who’d known me all my life. Every day we went swimming with two girls who lived next door and Kenny bought himself a brand-new motorcycle. He strapped me on the back and took me riding on it the first day he brought it home. I had been in California for about a month when one day there was a big photo on the front page of the L.A. Times —a group of vets had gone to Washington and thrown away their medals.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

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

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Almost immediately the name was mentioned she began to talk about herself, without ever quite losing hold of Henriette. Henriette was attached to her by a long, invisible string which she manipulated imperceptibly with one finger, like the street hawker who stands a little removed from the black cloth on the sidewalk, apparently indifferent to the little mechanism which is jiggling on the cloth, but betraying himself by the spasmodic movement of the little finger to which the black thread is attached. Henriette is me, my real self, she seemed to be saying. She wanted me to believe that Henriette was really the incarnation of evil. She said it so naturally, so innocently, with an almost subhuman candor—how was I to believe that she meant it? I could only smile as though to show her I was convinced. Suddenly I feel her coming. I turn my head. Yes, there she is coming full on, the sails spread, the eyes glowing. For the first time I see now what a carriage she has. She comes forward like a bird, a human bird wrapped in a soft fur. The engine is going full steam: I want to shout, to give a blast that will make the whole world cock its ears. What a walk! It’s not a walk, it’s a glide. Tall, stately, full-bodied, self-possessed, she cuts the smoke and jazz and red-light glow like the queen mother of all the slippery Babylonian whores. On the corner of Broadway just opposite the comfort station, this is happening. Broadway—it’s her realm. This is Broadway, this is New York, this is America. She’s America on foot, winged and sexed. She is the lubet, the abominate and the sublimate—with a dash of hydrochloric acid, nitroglycerin, laudanum and powdered onyx. Opulence she has, and magnificence; it’s America right or wrong, and the ocean on either side. For the first time in my life the whole continent hits me full force, hits me between the eyes. This is America, buffaloes or no buffaloes, America the emery wheel of hope and disillusionment. Whatever made America made her, bone, blood, muscle, eyeball, gait, rhythm, poise, confidence, brass and hollow gut. She’s almost on top of me, the full face gleaming like calcium. The big soft fur is slipping from her shoulder. She doesn’t notice it. She doesn’t seem to care if her clothes should drop off. She doesn’t give a fuck about anything. It’s America moving like a streak of lightning toward the glass warehouse of red-blooded hysteria. Amurrica, fur or no fur, shoes or no shoes. Amurrica C.O.D. And scram, you bastards, before we plug you! It’s got me in the guts, I’m quaking. Something’s coming to me and there’s no dodging it. She’s coming head on, through the plate glass window. If she would only stop a second, if she would only let me be for just one moment. But no, not a single moment does she grant me.

• 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 Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  And at the same time she took it in her hand and she squeezed it so hard I damned near fainted. Weeping all the while, too. And still harping on the Holy Ghost and her ‘innocence,’ I remembered what you told me once and so I gave her a sound slap in the jaw. It worked like magic. She quieted down after a bit, enough to let me slip it in, and then the real fun commenced. Listen, did you ever fuck a crazy woman? It’s something to experience. From the instant I got it in she started talking a blue streak. I can’t describe it to you exactly, but it was almost as though she didn’t know I was fucking her. Listen, I don’t know whether you’ve ever had a woman eat an apple while you were doing it . . . well, you can imagine how that affects you. This one was a thousand times worse. It got on my nerves so that I began to think I was a little queer myself. . . . And now here’s something you’ll hardly believe, but I’m telling you the truth. You know what she did when we got through? She put her arms around me and she thanked me. . . . Wait, that isn’t all. Then she got out of bed and she knelt down and offered up a prayer for my soul. Jesus, I remember that so well. ‘Please make Mac a better Christian,’ she said. And me lying there with a limp cock listening to her. I didn’t know whether I was dreaming or what. ‘Please make Mac a better Christian!’ Can you beat that?” “What are you doing tonight?” he added cheerfully. “Nothing special,” I said. “Then come along with me. I’ve got a gal I want you to meet. . . . Paula . I picked her up at the Roseland a few nights ago. She’s not crazy—she’s just a nymphomaniac. I want to see you dance with her. It’ll be a treat . . . just to watch you. Listen, if you don’t shoot off in your pants when she starts wiggling, well then I’m

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

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

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I got all the books I could on rockets and outer space and read them for hours in the library, completely fascinated by the drawings and the telescopes and the sky charts. I had an incredible rocket I got for Christmas that you had to pump compressed water into. I pulled back a plastic clip and it would send the thing blasting out across Castiglia’s lawn, then out onto Hamilton Avenue in a long arc of spurting water. Castiglia and I used to tape aluminum-foil rolls from Mom’s kitchen to the top of the plastic rocket then put ants and worms in the nosecone with a secret message wrapped in tissue paper. We had hundreds of rocket launchings that year. Though none of our payloads made it into orbit like the Sputniks, we had a lot of fun trying. In the spring of that year I remember the whole class went down to New York City and saw the movie Around the World in Eighty Days on a tremendous screen that made all of us feel like we were right there in the balloon flying around the world. After the movie we went to the Museum of Natural History, where Castiglia and I walked around staring up at the huge prehistoric dinosaurs billions of years old, and studied fossils inside the big glass cases and wondered what it would have been like if we had been alive back then. After the museum they took us to the Hayden Planetarium, where the whole sixth-grade class leaned back in special sky chairs, looking up into the dome where a projector that looked like a huge mechanical praying mantis kept us glued to the sky above our heads with meteor showers and comets and galaxies that appeared like tremendous snowstorms swirling in the pitch darkness of the incredible dome. They showed the whole beginning of the earth that afternoon, as we sat back in our chairs and dreamed of walking on the moon someday or going off to Mars wondering if there really was life there and rocketing off deeper and deeper into space through all the time barriers into places and dreams we could only begin to imagine. When we got on the school bus afterward and were all seated, Mr. Serby, our sixth-grade teacher, turned around and in a soft voice told us that someday men would walk upon the moon, and probably in our lifetime, he said, we would see it happen. We were still trying to catch up with the Russians when I heard on the radio that the United States was going to try and launch its first satellite, called Vanguard , into outer space. That night Mom and Dad and me and the rest of the kids watched the long pencil-like rocket on the television screen as it began to lift off after the countdown. It lifted off slowly at first.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  But then Z. drew back, letting his arm fall from her shoulder, and looked at her in disbelief. He jerked his head in a single vertical motion, a decided no. He started to turn toward N. but the waitress pressed her hand to his chest and gestured for him to come back. She spoke longer this time, her hand on his chest, balancing the empty tray on the table. Now Z. did turn to N., shouting into his ear, and N. shouted to me in turn that to stay at the table we had to buy the gin. Okay, I shouted back, how much, and when he told me 160 leva, 80 euro, I burst out laughing, making Z. and N. laugh, too. But the woman didn’t laugh, she shrugged, all her seductiveness gone. It’s crazy, Z. shouted, but the alternative was to stand in the packed space between the bar and the booths, where you could hardly breathe, what would be the point of that, and so I pulled out my billfold. One night, I said, my throat already raw with shouting and with smoke, and they smiled and pulled out their wallets. No no, I said, wagging my forefinger, I didn’t want them to spend their money. I had gone to the bankomat earlier that day, my wallet was full of bills, and I drew out several to hand to the woman, who smiled again, opening the gin and a can of tonic and pouring us our first drinks before she spun away. There were maybe seven or eight tables in our corner of the room, almost all of them taken by groups of young people, some of them high school students, I thought, two or three couples gathered at each. N. waved to catch our attention, then pointed back to the entrance, nodding to Z. before he left. Z. mouthed something at me but I didn’t understand, the music was too loud, and after he repeated it to no avail he dropped his hands to his crotch and mimed a man pissing, his hand curled as if around an impossibly large cock. I laughed, both because it was funny and because it hid the other thing I felt. I mocked him, first holding my hand up, curled like his, making a doubtful face, and then I dropped both hands to my own crotch, as if holding a cock twice as large, three times, and Z. laughed too, a genuine laugh, I thought, though it wasn’t very funny, and both of us seemed a little embarrassed once the laughter had passed.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  We were both certain that one of our teachers was a secret Communist agent and in our next secret club meeting we promised to report anything new he said during our next history class. We watched him very carefully that year. One afternoon he told us that China was going to have a billion people someday. “One billion!” he said, tightly clenching his fist. “Do you know what that means?” he said, staring out the classroom window. “Do you know what that’s going to mean?” he said in almost a whisper. He never finished what he was saying and after that Castiglia and I were convinced he was definitely a Communist. About that time I started doing push-ups in my room and squeezing rubber balls until my arms began to ache, trying to make my body stronger and stronger. I was fascinated by the muscle-men ads in the beginnings of the Superman comics, showing how a skinny guy could overnight transform his body into a hulk of fighting steel, and each day I increased the push-ups, more and more determined to build a strong and healthy body. I made muscles in the mirror for hours and checked my biceps each day with a tape measure, and did pull-ups on a bar in the doorway of my room before I went to school each morning. I was a little guy, back then, and used to put notches with a penny on the door of my room, little scratches with the coin to remind myself how tall I was and to see each week whether I’d grown. * * * “The human body is an amazing thing,” the coaches told us that fall when we started high school. “It is a beautiful remarkable machine that will last you a lifetime if you care for it properly.” And we listened to them, and worked and trained our young bodies until they were strong and quick. I joined the high-school wrestling team, practicing and working out every day down in the basement of Massapequa High School. The coaches made us do situps, push-ups, and spinning drills until sweat poured from our faces and we were sure we’d pass out. “Wanting to win and wanting to be first, that’s what’s important,” the coaches told us. “Play fair, but play to win,” they said. They worked us harder and harder until we thought we couldn’t take it anymore and then they would yell and shout for us to keep going and drive past all the physical pain and discomfort. “More! More!” they screamed. “If you want to win, then you’re going to have to work! You’re going to have to drive your bodies far beyond what you think you can do. You’ve got to pay the price for victory!

• 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 Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I told the doctors I wanted braces, and at first they resisted, explaining to me that my idea of walking again was unrealistic if not impossible and that the level of my injury, T4–T6, was too high and dragging my paralyzed body around with braces and crutches would surely prove to be too strenuous. Refusing to accept their verdict, I continued to insist that they allow me to have the braces—explaining that as a 100 percent service-connected combat vet who had just sacrificed three-quarters of his body in Vietnam, I deserved the opportunity to try to walk again. For the next few weeks I continued to ask for the braces, even threatening to call the media and hold a press conference on the Spinal Cord Injury ward unless they followed through with my request. Eventually the doctors relented and about a month later I received the braces. I can still remember the first time I put the braces on in the ADL (activity of daily living) room with the help of my two physical therapists, Dick Carter and Jimmy Ford. I was so excited and couldn’t wait to get up on my feet. Carefully positioning myself behind the parallel bars, I grabbed ahold of both bars and in one quick motion lifted myself out of my wheelchair, and, with the help of my braces, stood in an upright position for the first time since my injury. I felt a bit weak and shaky at first but it was wonderful to be standing again, even if I couldn’t feel anything from my midchest down and had to imagine where my lower body and feet were. With Jimmy and Dick guiding me, I began to drag myself step by step as far as I could along the parallel bars until I was exhausted. “It’s beautiful up here!” I remember shouting to no one in particular, thrilled at the renewal of my old vantage point. Every day after that I arrived at the ADL room early to put on my braces. I would then begin my daily routine, dragging my paralyzed body back and forth between the parallel bars, determined to do my very best. By the second week I had already left the confines and safety of the parallel bars and begun to venture around the ADL room, proudly dragging my lifeless body past the others in their wheelchairs and no longer afraid to set out on my own. Each day, as I grew more and more confident and my stamina increased, so did my determination to go farther. By the third week I was now dragging my body down the hall and onto the paraplegic ward, visiting the other patients in their rooms and confounding many of the doctors and nurses who had earlier dismissed my belief that I would walk again.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  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. He saw a light, a fire he thought, flickering in the distance off to the right of the village, with little dark figures that seemed to be moving behind it. He could not tell how far away they were from there. It was very hard to tell distance in the dark. The lieutenant moved next to him. “You see?” he whispered. “Look,” he said, very keyed up now. “They’ve got rifles. Can you see the rifles? Can you see them?” the lieutenant asked him. He looked very hard through the rain. “Can you see them?” “Yes, I see them. I see them,” he said. He was very sure. The lieutenant put his arm around him and whispered in his ear. “Tell them down at the end to give me an illumination. I want this whole place lit up like a fucking Christmas tree.” Turning quickly to the man on his right, he told him what the lieutenant had said. He told him to pass the instructions all the way to the end of the line, where a flare would be fired just above the small fire near the village. Lying there in the mud behind the dike, he stared at the fire that still flickered in the rain. He could still see the little figures moving back and forth against it like small shadows on a screen. He felt the whole line tense, then heard the WOOOORSHH of the flare cracking overhead in a tremendous ball of sputtering light turning night into day, arching over their heads toward the small fire that he now saw was burning inside an open hut. Suddenly someone was firing from the end with his rifle, and now the whole line opened up, roaring their weapons like thunder, pulling their triggers again and again without even thinking, emptying everything they had into the hut in a tremendous stream of bright orange tracers that crisscrossed each other in the night. The flare arched its last sputtering bits into the village and it became dark, and all he could see were the bright orange embers from the fire that had gone

• 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 Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I was so excited and couldn’t wait to get up on my feet. Carefully positioning myself behind the parallel bars, I grabbed ahold of both bars and in one quick motion lifted myself out of my wheelchair, and, with the help of my braces, stood in an upright position for the first time since my injury. I felt a bit weak and shaky at first but it was wonderful to be standing again, even if I couldn’t feel anything from my midchest down and had to imagine where my lower body and feet were. With Jimmy and Dick guiding me, I began to drag myself step by step as far as I could along the parallel bars until I was exhausted. “It’s beautiful up here!” I remember shouting to no one in particular, thrilled at the renewal of my old vantage point. Every day after that I arrived at the ADL room early to put on my braces. I would then begin my daily routine, dragging my paralyzed body back and forth between the parallel bars, determined to do my very best. By the second week I had already left the confines and safety of the parallel bars and begun to venture around the ADL room, proudly dragging my lifeless body past the others in their wheelchairs and no longer afraid to set out on my own. Each day, as I grew more and more confident and my stamina increased, so did my determination to go farther. By the third week I was now dragging my body down the hall and onto the paraplegic ward, visiting the other patients in their rooms and confounding many of the doctors and nurses who had earlier dismissed my belief that I would walk again. I said hello to everyone, including a few of the doctors and nurses who had warned me that for a high-level injury like my own—no use of my stomach muscles, and a spine that had been severed by a bullet—the odds against me walking again, much less even getting up on my feet, were astronomical. Some of them looked at me like I was crazy while still others chose to simply ignore me, turning their heads as I dragged myself past them. Of course, back then as a fiercely determined, twenty-one-year-old former Marine Corps sergeant just back from a war and a former high school athlete, I believed I could accomplish anything I set out to do. As far as I was concerned, like Jafu, nothing was impossible. I remember telling Jimmy Ford several weeks later that the only way I was going to leave the hospital was on my feet. “I’m going to walk out of this place, Jimmy, if it’s the last thing I do!” By late November of 1968, having been in the hospital a little over eleven months and my rehab now complete, I was finally ready to be released.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Eternal Values was founded by Freddie Mierers, a native New Yorker, who grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. In the seventies, Mierers, a former model and interior designer, reinvented himself as “Frederick Von Mierers,” a new-age astrologer and guru who focused on attracting wealthy WASPs as members.107 When he was 16, Hoyt met Von Mierers on the beach on Nantucket, where Hoyt’s family vacationed every summer. Hoyt developed a friendship with Von Mierers over the summers. While attending college at Princeton, where he studied economics and played football, he would occasionally visit Freddie in Manhattan. Hoyt explains, “My early memories with Frederick in New York were going to Studio 54. Frederick could get me and his troupe of attractive followers whisked right through the large crowd out front of the club. It was a crazy scene. Celebrities and beautiful women were everywhere. I was only 18 and it all seemed like a fairy tale. At the end of the night, we’d gather a group of hip club goers and go back to Frederick’s apartment for his version of ‘high tea.’ We’d have these long spiritual conversations until dawn. I found it all terribly exciting and harmless, or so I thought. I remember, at the time, even feeling like I was taking advantage of him.” During Hoyt’s sophomore year, a chronic shoulder injury worsened and he found himself in a dilemma. Doctors told Hoyt that he would need major surgery to both shoulders if he wanted to continue to play football, with no guarantee that the surgeries would be successful. The alternative was to give up football. “For me, it felt like an identity crisis. I had played football all my life and my closest friends were my teammates. I really felt lost. This is when Frederick swooped in to ‘my rescue’ and suggested I give modeling and commercials a try,” Hoyt said. Hoyt agreed and met with early success. This led to more trips to New York City for auditions. When he graduated with a degree in economics, Hoyt moved in with Von Mierers’ group. The group was largely made up of younger yuppie types—Ivy League lawyers and architects and a smattering of actors and models. Von Mierers’ main theme was apocalyptic—he predicted that by the turn of the century, a cataclysmic geological event, known as a pole shift, would occur and most of the planet’s population would perish. Only certain pockets of humanity would survive in secret “safe places.” Highly evolved souls, like Von Mierers and his followers, would be lifted off the planet by space aliens, trained, and brought back to Earth in the aftermath, to lead the building of a new-age utopian society.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It’s only a stretch of a few blocks, from Times Square to Fiftieth Street, and when one says Broadway that’s all that’s really meant and it’s really nothing, just a chicken run and a lousy one at that, but at seven in the evening when everybody’s rushing for a table there’s a sort of electrical crackle in the air and your hair stands on end like antennae and if you’re receptive you not only get every flash and flicker but you get the statistical itch, the quid pro quo of the interactive, interstitial, ectoplasmatic quantum of bodies jostling in space like the stars which compose the Milky Way, only this is the Gay White Way, the top of the world with no roof above and not even a crack or a hole under your feet to fall through and say it’s a lie. The absolute impersonality of it brings you to a pitch of warm human delirium which makes you run forward like a blind nag and wag your delirious ears. Every one is so utterly, confoundedly not himself that you become automatically the personification of the whole human race, shaking hands with a thousand human hands, cackling with a thousand different human tongues, cursing, applauding, whistling, crooning, soliloquizing, orating, gesticulating, urinating, fecundating, wheedling, cajoling, whimpering, bartering, pimping, caterwauling, and so on and so forth. You are all the men who ever lived up to Moses, and beyond that you are a woman buying a hat, or a bird cage, or just a mouse trap. You can lie in wait in a show window, like a fourteen-carat gold ring, or you can climb the side of a building like a human fly, but nothing will stop the procession, not even umbrellas flying at lightning speed, nor double-decked walruses marching calmly to the oyster banks. Broadway, such as I see it now and have seen it for twenty-five years, is a ramp that was conceived by St. Thomas Aquinas while he was yet in the womb. It was meant originally to be used only by snakes and lizards, by the horned toad and the red heron, but when the great Spanish Armada was sunk the human kind wriggled out of the ketch and slopped over, creating by a sort of foul, ignominious squirm and wiggle the cuntlike cleft that runs from the Battery south to the golf links north through the dead and wormy center of Manhattan Island. From Times Square to Fiftieth Street all that St. Thomas Aquinas forgot to include in his magnum opus is here included, which is to say, among other things, hamburger sandwiches, collar buttons, poodle dogs, slot machines, gray bowlers, typewriter ribbons, orange sticks, free toilets, sanitary napkins, mint jujubes, billiard balls, chopped onions, crinkled doilies, manholes, chewing gum, sidecars and sourballs, cellophane, cord tires, magnetos, horse liniment, cough drops, feenamint, and that feline opacity of the hysterically endowed eunuch who marches to the soda fountain with a sawed-off shotgun between his legs.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  The semester had just started and I thought I might be able to get lucky with one of the women, so I drove to their house that night after class. When I arrived I found a lively group of about 30 people from half a dozen countries. I asked if they were a religious group. “Oh, no, not at all,” they said, and laughed. They told me they were part of something called the One World Crusade, dedicated to overcoming cultural differences among people and to combating major social problems, such as the ones I was concerned about. “One world where people treat each other with love and respect,” I thought to myself. “What idealists these people are!” I enjoyed the stimulating conversations and energetic atmosphere at the meeting. These people related to each other like brothers and sisters and clearly felt they were part of one global family. They seemed very happy with their lives. After a month of feeling depressed, I was invigorated by all that positive energy. I went home that night feeling lucky to have met such nice people. The next day I ran into Tony, the man who had approached me in the cafeteria. “Did you enjoy the evening?” he asked. I answered that I had. “Well, listen,” Tony said. “This afternoon Adri, who’s from Holland, is going to give a short lecture on some interesting principles of life. Why don’t you come over?” I listened to Adri’s lecture a few hours later. It seemed vague and a bit simplistic, but optimistic, and I could agree with nearly everything he said. However, the content of his speech didn’t explain why everyone in this group seemed so happy all the time. I felt there must be something wrong with me or something exceptional about them. My curiosity was engaged. I wound up going back the next day. This time another person gave a talk about the origin of all the problems that humankind has had to face. This lecture had a decidedly religious tone; it dealt with Adam and Eve and how they were corrupted by a misuse of love in the Garden of Eden. At that point I didn’t notice that my questions were never answered, and didn’t suspect I was being deliberately strung along. However, I did feel a bit confused and said I didn’t think I’d be coming back.

• 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.

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

  Then there was black church. There was always some kind of black church service going on somewhere, and we tried them all. In the township, that typically meant an outdoor, tent-revival-style church. We usually went to my grandmother’s church, an old-school Methodist congregation, five hundred African grannies in blue-and-white blouses, clutching their Bibles and patiently burning in the hot African sun. Black church was rough, I won’t lie. No air-conditioning. No lyrics up on Jumbotrons. And it lasted forever, three or four hours at least, which confused me because white church was only like an hour—in and out, thanks for coming. But at black church I would sit there for what felt like an eternity, trying to figure out why time moved so slowly. Is it possible for time to actually stop? If so, why does it stop at black church and not at white church? I eventually decided black people needed more time with Jesus because we suffered more. “I’m here to fill up on my blessings for the week,” my mother used to say. The more time we spent at church, she reckoned, the more blessings we accrued, like a Starbucks Rewards Card. Black church had one saving grace. If I could make it to the third or fourth hour I’d get to watch the pastor cast demons out of people. People possessed by demons would start running up and down the aisles like madmen, screaming in tongues. The ushers would tackle them, like bouncers at a club, and hold them down for the pastor. The pastor would grab their heads and violently shake them back and forth, shouting, “I cast out this spirit in the name of Jesus!” Some pastors were more violent than others, but what they all had in common was that they wouldn’t stop until the demon was gone and the congregant had gone limp and collapsed on the stage. The person had to fall. Because if he didn’t fall that meant the demon was powerful and the pastor needed to come at him even harder. You could be a linebacker in the NFL. Didn’t matter. That pastor was taking you down. Good Lord, that was fun. Christian karaoke, badass action stories, and violent faith healers—man, I loved church. The thing I didn’t love was the lengths we had to go to in order to get to church. It was an epic slog. We lived in Eden Park, a tiny suburb way outside Johannesburg. It took us an hour to get to white church, another forty-five minutes to get to mixed church, and another forty-five minutes to drive out to Soweto for black church. Then, if that wasn’t bad enough, some Sundays we’d double back to white church for a special evening service. By the time we finally got home at night, I’d collapse into bed.

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

  Then, immediately after assembly, there would be a race to the tuck shop because the queue to buy food was so long. Every minute you spent in the queue was working against your break time. The sooner you got your food, the longer you had to eat, play a game of soccer, or hang out. Also, if you got there late, the best food was gone. Two things were true about me at that age. One, I was still the fastest kid in school. And two, I had no pride. The second we were dismissed from assembly I would run like a bat out of hell to the tuck shop so I could be the first one there. I was always first in line. I became notorious for being that guy, so much so that people started coming up to me in line. “Hey, can you buy this for me?” Which would piss off the kids behind me because it was basically cutting the line. So people started approaching me during assembly. They’d say, “Hey, I’ve got ten rand. If you buy my food for me, I’ll give you two.” That’s when I learned: time is money. I realized people would pay me to buy their food because I was willing to run for it. I started telling everyone at assembly, “Place your orders. Give me a list of what you want, give me a percentage of what you’re going to spend, and I’ll buy your food for you.” I was an overnight success. Fat guys were my number-one customers. They loved food, but couldn’t run. I had all these rich, fat white kids who were like, “This is fantastic! My parents spoil me, I’ve got money, and now I’ve got a way I can get food without having to work for it—and I still get my break.” I had so many customers I was turning kids away. I had a rule: I would take five orders a day, high bidders only. I’d make so much that I could buy my lunch using other kids’ money and keep the lunch money my mom gave me for pocket cash. Then I could afford to catch a bus home instead of walking or save up to buy whatever. Every day I’d take orders, assembly would end, and I’d make my mad dash and buy everybody’s hot dogs and Cokes and muffins. If you paid me extra you could even tell me where you’d be and I’d deliver it to you. I’d found my niche. Since I belonged to no group I learned to move seamlessly between groups. I floated. I was a chameleon, still, a cultural chameleon. I learned how to blend. I could play sports with the jocks. I could talk computers with the nerds. I could jump in the circle and dance with the township kids. I popped around to everyone, working, chatting, telling jokes, making deliveries.