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 Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Jan looked out the window like she was daydreaming. I waited. Jan smiled and reached for the bottle of whiskey. “It’s OK.” She took a slug and shivered. “No harm done. You ever work at the cannery before?” I shook my head. She smiled and patted my cheek roughly. “Tl show you the ropes.” With those kind words she welcomed me back to the only real family ?’'d ever known. I STILL REMEMBER THE MOMENT Jan and I walked into the cannery and I saw Theresa, standing right there in front of me. She was working on a machine, coring apples. I was trying to get a better look at her, wondering what color her hair was under that white paper net. “You coming or not?” the foreman asked me. I hung back for a moment. Her smile told me she already knew she had my complete attention. Even when we were filling out forms in the foreman’s office, I still felt floored and flustered. Theresa never stopped affecting me just that much. The foreman noticed, but he must not have cared because he assigned me to work on the line near her. I watched as each woman put an apple on a spindle and pressed a foot pedal. The apples spun around and were peeled and cored in the process. All of it landed on a conveyor belt headed toward me. Just past me, the conveyor split into two belts. The foreman handed me a stick. I looked at it stupidly. He told me to hit the cores and peels one way, the apples another. “That’s it?” I asked. He snorted and walked away. Thus began my short-lived career as an apple hitter. I knew Theresa was watching so I wanted to do it suavely, but that was kind of stretching it, considering the task. “What are you doing?” she asked me. I shrugged. “I’m inspecting the apples—you know, quality of the fruit, worm holes, efficiency of the coring and peeling operation.” She threw her head back and smiled. “You mean you're an apple-bopper?” “Yeah,” I laughed. “Something like that.” “Hey you, asshole!” someone at the end of the conveyor belts yelled. OK, so I had let a few peels go down the apple belt. Big deal! Theresa laughed softly and went back to her work. She was playing with me. This flirtation was one of life’s unexpected pleasures. Almost as soon as it started, it ended. The foreman announced he was moving me. “I could do a better job hitting these apples,” I insisted. I followed him to another part of the plant where the actual canning was done. The noise terrified me. The foreman pointed to a Y-shaped conveyor belt running parallel to the ceiling. I saw a guy up there straddling a giant pipe near the point where the conveyor belt split into two. Every few seconds a carton came down the single belt. He diverted them alternately one way or another. I was replacing him.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

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

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  The barber smoothed back my hair and pursed his lips. “What about a flat top?” “Yeah! That would be a change.” The electric razor buzzed across the top of my DA from back to front. Clumps of hair fell on my nose. The barber brushed them off with the soft hairs of a brush. He clipped and trimmed my hair until it formed a perfectly symmetrical flat top. He brushed me off thoroughly. I started to get up. “Not yet,” he said. He lathered my sideburns and the back of my hairline with shaving cream and scraped a clean line with a straight razor. He toweled the last bits of lather from my neck. Just when I thought he must be finished he splashed a little bay rum on his palms and rubbed it on my cheeks. He shook powder on the brush and swept it across the back of my neck. With a flourish he pulled away the red cloth that covered me and gave me a hand mirror so I could see the back of my hair. “What do you think, my friend?” This time I didn’t try to hide my excitement. I was passing. It was time for the most important test of all: the men’s room. I walked around a department store until I couldn’t stand it any longer. I paced outside the men’s room. What would happen if I walked in? I'd have to find out sooner or later. I pushed open the door. Two men stood in front of urinals. They glanced at me and looked away. Nothing happened. I found an empty stall and locked the door. They could still see my feet if they looked. Did men ever sit down to urinate? I flushed the toiled to covet the sound. I immediately felt something wet and cold against my ass and thighs. The toilet was overflowing. I jumped up but it was too late, my Levi’s were soaked. I rebuttoned my jeans and hurried out of the men’s room. I pushed my way through the crowds of shoppers and made my way back to my Triumph. All I wanted was to drive home, strip off my jeans, and shower off the feeling of stupidity. I sat down on my bike and thought about it. It hadn’t been so bad, really. Now I knew better than to flush the Stone Butch Blues 185 toilet without paying attention to the water level as it rose. But I thought back to the moment I’d walked into the men’s room. They hardly noticed me. I could go to the bathroom whenever and wherever I needed to without pressure or shame. What an enormous relief. | At first, everything was fun. The world stopped feeling like a gauntlet I had to run through. But very quickly I discovered that passing didn’t just mean slipping below the surface, it meant being buried alive.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I got my hopes up. Then they sunk. “Oh, it probably doesn’t mean a thing,” I concluded. Jan smiled like there was something else. “Well, she did ask if you were single.” My jaw dropped. I couldn’t recover my composure. “For Christsake, be cool,” Jan patted my arm. “Jan, what’s her name?” “Theresa.” I savored her name, repeating it over in my mind. When you do that, it’s a sign something big is happening in your heart. At the end of the day I looked for Theresa at the time clock, but she was hidden in the wave of hundreds of workers leaving and hundreds more entering for the next shift. I didn’t talk much on the bus ride home. I just stared out the window. Jan laughed softly and shook her head. The next day I could hardly wait to get to work. Jan and I were assigned to load trucks. It was heavy work. I was leaning up against a pole smoking a cigarette when Theresa walked by to go to the bathroom. Actually, the bathroom was in the opposite direction. I felt embarrassed because I was dripping with sweat and my white T-shirt was filthy. Theresa smiled. “I like sweaty butches,” she said, as though she’d read my mind. Man, those boxes sailed out of my hands all day as though they were filled with feathers. For the next week I didn’t sleep much. I leaped out of bed as soon as the alarm rang and rode the long distance out to the cannery in excited Stone Butch Blues 29 anticipation. I saw Theresa at least twice a shift. I was floating a foot off the ground. Then, one day, Jan pulled me aside after a break. “Got some bad news for you, kid.” Theresa had been fired. The General Superintendent called her into his office to go over her six-month review. That’s when he grabbed her breasts. Jan said Theresa kicked him in the shin, yelled at him, and then kicked him in the other shin. Good for her. Anyway, he fired her. I crashed from the summit of euphoria. It was just a job after that. Worse, really, because it had been so much fun. I knew it was time to ask the temp agency for another assignment. The following Friday night I showered and dressed up. When I got to Abba’s, I was glad I had. There was Theresa, leaning on the bar. I had never expected to see her again. She had cajoled some friends into driving her to Buffalo to look for me. Lucky for me there was only one gay bat at a time. The hue of Theresa’s hair reminded me of the lustrous colors of a chestnut. It was well worth waiting to see. Her eyes didn’t hide how happy she was to see me. I think she would have liked to hug 130 = Leslie Feinberg

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I laughed all day long thinking what a fine stinking mess I was making of it. Complaints were pouring in from all parts of the city. The service was crippled, constipated, strangulated. A mule could have gotten there faster than some of the idiots I put into harness. The best thing about the new day was the introduction of female messengers. It changed the whole atmosphere of the joint. For Hymie especially it was a godsend. He moved his switchboard around so that he could watch me while juggling the waybills back and forth. Despite the added work he had a permanent erection. He came to work with a smile and he smiled all day long. He was in heaven. At the end of the day I always had a list of five or six who were worth trying out. The game was to keep them on the string, to promise them a job but to get a free fuck first. Usually it was only necessary to throw a feed into them in order to bring them back to the office at night and lay them out on the zinc- covered table in the dressing room. If they had a cosy apartment, as they sometimes did, we took them home and finished it in bed. If they liked to drink Hymie would bring a bottle along. If they were any good and really needed some dough Hymie would flash his roll and peel off a five spot or a ten spot, as the case might be. It makes my mouth water when I think of that roll he carried about with him. Where he got it from I never knew, because he was the lowest- paid man in the joint. But it was always there, and no matter what I asked for I got. And once it happened that we did get a bonus and I paid Hymie back to the last penny—which so amazed him that he took me out that night to Delmonico’s and spent a fortune on me. Not only that, but the next day he insisted on buying me a hat and shirts and gloves. He even insinuated that I might come home and fuck his wife, if I liked, though he warned me that she was having a little trouble at present with her ovaries. In addition to Hymie and McGovern I had as assistants a pair of beautiful blondes who often accompanied us to dinner in the evening. And there was O’Mara, an old friend of mine who had just returned from the Philippines and whom I made my chief assistant. There was also Steve Romero, a prize bull whom I kept around in case of trouble. And O’Rourke, the company detective, who reported to me at the close of day when he began his work. Finally I added another man to the staff—Kronski, a young medical student, who was diabolically interested in the pathological cases of which we had plenty.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  The door slid open and they walked down a hall carpeted with dense brown nylon. The grandmother’s apartment opened before them. Beth found the refrigerator and opened it. There was a crumpled package of French bread, a jar of hot peppers, several lumps covered with aluminum foil, two bottles of wine and a six-pack. “Is your grandmother an alcoholic?” she asked. “I don’t know.” He dropped his heavy leather bag and her white canvas one in the living room, took off his coat and threw it on the bags. She watched him standing there, pale and gaunt in a black leather shirt tied at his waist with a leather belt. That image of him would stay with her for years for no good reason and with no emotional significance. He dropped into a chair, his thin arms flopping lightly on its arms. He nodded at the tray of whiskey, Scotch and liqueurs on the coffee table before him. “Why don’t you make yourself a drink?” She dropped to her knees beside the table and nervously played with the bottles. He was watching her quietly, his expression hooded. She plucked a bottle of thick chocolate liqueur from the cluster, poured herself a glass and sat in the chair across from his with both hands around it. She could no longer ignore the character of the apartment. It was brutally ridiculous, almost sadistic in its absurdity. The couch and chairs were covered with a floral print. A thin maize carpet zipped across the floor. There were throw rugs. There were artificial flowers. There was an abundance of small tables and shelves housing a legion of figures; grinning glass maidens in sumptuous gowns bore baskets of glass roses, ceramic birds warbled from the ceramic stumps they clung to, glass horses galloped across teakwood pastures. A ceramic weather poodle and his diamond-eyed kitty-cat companions silently watched the silent scene in the room. “Are you all right?” he asked. “I hate this apartment. It’s really awful.” “What were you expecting? Jesus Christ. It’s a lot like yours, you know.” “Yes. That’s true, I have to admit.” She drank her liqueur. “Do you think you could improve your attitude about this whole thing? You might try being a little more positive.” Coming from him, this question was preposterous. He must be so pathologically insecure that his perception of his own behavior was thoroughly distorted. He saw rejection everywhere, she decided; she must reassure him. “But I do feel positive about being here,” she said. She paused, searching for the best way to express the extremity of her positive feelings. She invisibly implored him to see and mount their blue puffball bed. “It would be impossible for you to disappoint me. The whole idea of you makes me happy.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Maybe at the same time, or thereabouts, while Jarry was saying “in eating the sound of moths,” and Apollinaire repeating after him “near a gentleman swallowing himself,” and Breton murmuring softly “night’s pedals move uninterruptedly,” perhaps “in the air beautiful and black” which the lone Jew had found under the Southern Cross another man, also lonely and exiled and of Spanish origin, was preparing to put down on paper these memorable words: “I seek, all in all, to console myself for my exile, for my exile from eternity, for that unearthing (destierro) which I am fond of referring to as my unheavening. . . . At present, I think that the best way to write this novel is to tell how it should be written. It is the novel of the novel, the creation of creation. Or God of God, Deus de Deo.” Had I known he was going to add this, this which follows, I would surely have gone off like a bomb. . . . “By being crazy is understood losing one’s reason. Reason, but not the truth, for there are madmen who speak truths while others keep silent. . . .” Speaking of these things, speaking of the war and the war dead, I cannot refrain from mentioning that some twenty years later I ran across this in French by a Frenchman. O miracles of miracles! “II faut le dire, il y a des cadavres que je ne respecte qu’à moitié.” Yes, yes, and again yes! O, let us do some rash thing—for the sheer pleasure of it! Let us do something live and magnificent, even if destructive! Said the mad cobbler: “All things are generated out of the grand mystery, and proceed out of one degree into another. Whatever goes forward in its degree, the same receives no abominate.” Everywhere in all times the same ovarian world announcing itself. Yet also, parallel with these announcements, these prophecies, these gynecological manifestoes, parallel and contemporaneous with them new totem poles, new taboos, new war dances. While into the air so black and beautiful the brothers of man, the poets, the diggers of the future, were spitting their magic lines, in this same time, O profound and perplexing riddle, other men were saying: “Won’t you please come and take a job in our ammunition factory.

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

  It was a Saturday night. We were hanging out at the entrance to the stationery shop, leaning up against the gate. I reached in to grab a chocolate, and at that exact moment a mall cop came around the corner and saw me with my arm in up to my shoulder. I brought my hand out with a bunch of chocolates in it. It was almost like a movie. I saw him. He saw me. His eyes went wide. I tried to walk away, acting natural. Then he shouted out, “Hey! Stop!” And the chase was on. We bolted, heading for the doors. I knew if a guard cut us off at the exit we’d be trapped, so we were hauling ass as fast as we could. We cleared the exit. The second we hit the parking lot, mall cops were coming at us from every direction, a dozen of them at least. I was running with my head down. These guards knew me. I was in that mall all the time. The guards knew my mom, too. She did her banking at that mall. If they even caught a glimpse of who I was, I was dead. We ran straight across the parking lot, ducking and weaving between parked cars, the guards right behind us, yelling. We made it to the petrol station out at the road, ran through there, and hooked left up the main road. They chased and chased and we ran and ran, and it was awesome. The risk of getting caught was half the fun of being naughty, and now the chase was on. I was loving it. I was shitting myself, but also loving it. This was my turf. This was my neighborhood. You couldn’t catch me in my neighborhood. I knew every alley and every street, every back wall to climb over, every fence with a gap big enough to slip through. I knew every shortcut you could possibly imagine. As a kid, wherever I went, whatever building I was in, I was always plotting my escape. You know, in case shit went down. In reality I was a nerdy kid with almost no friends, but in my mind I was an important and dangerous man who needed to know where every camera was and where all the exit points were. I knew we couldn’t run forever. We needed a plan. As Teddy and I booked past the fire station there was a road off to the left, a dead end that ran into a metal fence. I knew that there was a hole in the fence to squeeze through and on the far side was an empty field behind the mall that took you back to the main road and back to my house. A grown-up couldn’t fit through the hole, but a kid could. All my years of imagining the life of a secret agent for myself finally paid off. Now that I needed an escape, I had one.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I laughed in relief. “How did she know I worked here?” “She saw you leaving the parking lot. She a friend of yours?” Bolt asked me. “Naw,” I distanced myself. “Just somebody I used to work with.” My own disloyalty sickened me. Bolt headed for the dock. “You coming to lunch?” I shook my head. “Tll be along, go ahead.” It was a telief to be alone. I wandered into the warehouse and sat down on a stack of skids to think about Bolt’s bombshell. Frankie was coming onto the day shift. It scared me to realize she might have exposed me. But apparently she didn’t. Frankie was sharp. She must have figured out the score right away. A feeling of excitement flooded me. Working with another butch! Maybe we could hang out sometimes. Maybe she knew where some of the old crowd was. Maybe she could introduce me to a femme. “Hey, young fella.” Scotty interrupted my thoughts. He was sitting on the floor, leaning up against the skids. Scotty unscrewed a bottle of Jack Daniels and offered it to me. “Thanks,” I said, taking a swig. Scotty tipped the bottle to his lips and swallowed three times. We sat in silence. “You married?” he asked me. I shook my head. He dropped his head to his chest. “My wife’s real sick.” He rubbed his eyes with his hands. His face brightened. “Did I ever show you a picture of my wifer” I shook my head. He pulled out a leather wallet, thin and smooth from wear. “Here she is. That’s my girl.” I laughed and whistled. ““That’s your” He smiled. “Yep. You think I was born this age? I was once a young fella just like you. Had my whole life ahead of me.” We both laughed. But when I looked at him again, his eyes were filled with tears. His voice sounded hoarse. “I wish I could go before she does. I know that sounds terrible. I mean, who would take cate of her, you know? But sometimes I don’t think I can stand letting go of her when the time comes.” His head dropped down again. I reached out and lay my hand gently on his back, ready to remove it quickly if my touch offended him. It didn’t. “You're young,” Scotty said, abruptly. “Don’t get stuck in a job like this.” I shrugged. “This job seems pretty good to me.” Stone Butch Blues 211 Scotty shook his head. “I mean a real job. I had twenty years in the Chevy plant. I got my UAW card, you want to see it? Twenty years of my life in a plant and they laid me off. Can you believe it?” “Chevy? Did you work with Bolt?” Scotty nodded. “Yeah. But he wasn’t there as long as I was. He worked at Harrison for a while. Got laid off there, too.” Bolt interested me. “Was he in the same union?”

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  “My name’s Bernice. I really liked what you said.” I shook her hand and found her power in the sureness of her grip. “You been out a long time, huh” she asked me. I didn’t know if she meant how long Id been gay ot how long I'd stood and watched the gay movement from the outside. Both were true. “There’s lesbian dances at the Community Center on the third Saturday of each month. I could introduce you to some of my friends. Maybe we could talk.” I shrugged. “I don’t know if I can deal with arguing my way into a women’s dance.” Bernice shrugged. “We could meet you outside. We could all go in together. My friend’s on the door. Nobody’ll hassle you if we’re all together. That’s part of what you were talking about, isn’t it?” I laughed. “T didn’t quite expect to see it right away.” Bernice shifted from foot to foot. “So what do you say? You wanna come?” “Yeah,” I nodded. “I’m scared, but I do want to 9 go. “Cool,” she said. “Here’s my number. Give me a call.” I climbed up on the rim of a garbage can and looked around the edges of the crowd for the femme woman whose eyes had recognized me. She was gone. I hurried home and ran up the stairs two at a time. “Ruth,” I knocked on her door. “Open up.” She looked alarmed. “Jess, what is it?” “T spoke, Ruth. There was this rally in Sheridan Square and they let people get up and talk and I did. I spoke, Ruth. In front of hundreds of people. I wish you could have been there. I wish you could have heard me.” Stone Butch Blues 325 Ruth wrapped her arms around me and sighed. “T have been hearing you, honey,” she whispered in my ear. “Once you break the silence, it’s just the beginning.” “Can I use your phone?” She shrugged. “Sute.” I knew exactly who I wanted to see. I called the union office on 17 Street and asked for Duffy. I recognized his voice right away. Its familiarity warmed me. “Duffy, it’s me—Jess. Jess Goldberg,” “Jess?” He spoke my name in a rush of air. “Oh, Jess. I’ve had an apology in my mouth for a long time. Can you forgive me for exposing you on the job the way I did?” I smiled. “Oh, I forgave you a while ago. But ’m all excited today. I want to talk to you. I want to see you right this minute.” Duffy laughed. “Where are your How did you know where to find me?” “T’m living here. Frankie told me where you worked.” “How long would it take you to get here?” he asked. I checked my watch. “Fifteen minutes, tops.” “There’s a restaurant on 16", on the west side of Union Square. PIl meet you there.” 326 = Leslie Feinberg

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

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

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

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

• From 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.

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

  145Lecture 15—The First Great Awakening õThere were three things that were new and important about Whitefield’s preaching: his rhetorical style, his willingness to break with convention, and his connection with the audience. õHis style was both theatrical and extemporaneous. He did it all off the top of his head, or made it seem that way, and he also used music to excite his audience. ✳Whitefield didn’t respect the usual rules about where and when to preach. He preached wherever the people were, not just inside a church. ✳He had a charisma that electrified his listeners, and he capitalized on that. He relied on public opinion, not the church hierarchy, to make him a celebrity. Whitefield’s tactic was not to convince you to obey church authorities, but to persuade you that if you, the individual, would simply recognize your sins and open yourself up to God’s grace, you could be saved. He put aside that thorny problem of predestination. õWherever he went, he was controversial. He was not a social radical; his message was not pro-democracy or overtly political. He endorsed slavery, probably because he wanted to be able to preach in the South. Yet he had enemies: When he came to town, they booed and threw rotten eggs, even dead cats. õThe reason: He challenged the authority of the clerical establishment. But also, these revivals provoked a disagreement among ministers over how Christian conversion happened, and these fights split churches. õWhitefield was a so-called New Light; his enemies were Old Lights. New Lights were the evangelicals. They looked for the sudden, emotional born-again experience. Old Lights were very skeptical of the conversions that happened at revivals. They thought Whitefield was a charlatan who manipulated his listeners’ emotions, and that conversion was a subtle, years-long process.

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

  I upgraded to a 56k modem. I got faster CD writers, multiple CD writers. I started downloading more, copying more, selling more. That’s when I got two middlemen of my own, my friend Tom, who went to Northview, and my friend Bongani, who lived in Alex. One day Bongani came to me and said, “You know what would make a lot of money? Instead of copying whole albums, why don’t you put the best tracks of different albums onto one CD, because people only wanna hear the songs they like.” That sounded like a great idea, so I started making mix CDs. Those sold well. Then a few weeks later Bongani came back and said, “Can you make the tracks fade into one another so the music moves from track one to track two without a break and the beat carries on? It’ll be like a DJ playing a complete set the whole night.” That sounded like a great idea, too. I downloaded a program called BPM, “beats per minute.” It had a graphical interface that looked like two vinyl records side by side, and I could mix and fade between songs, basically everything a DJ can do live. I started making party CDs, and those started selling like hotcakes, too. — Business was booming. By matric I was balling, making 500 rand a week. To put that in perspective, there are maids in South Africa who still earn less than that today. It’s a shit salary if you’re trying to support a family, but as a sixteen-year-old living at home with no real expenses, I was living the dream. For the first time in my life I had money, and it was the most liberating thing in the world. The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money. With money, I experienced freedom on a whole new level: I went to McDonald’s. People in America don’t understand, but when an American chain opens in a third-world country, people go crazy. That’s true to this day. A Burger King opened for the first time in South Africa last year, and there was a queue around the block. It was an event. Everyone was going around saying, “I have to eat at Burger King. Have you heard? It’s from America.” The funny thing was that the queue was actually just white people. White people went bat-shit crazy for Burger King. Black people were like, whatever. Black people didn’t need Burger King. Our hearts were with KFC and McDonald’s.

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

  It was as if the teachers, many of whom were white, had been given a mandate. “Whatever you do, don’t make the kids angry.” GO HITLER! When I was in grade nine, three Chinese kids transferred to Sandringham: Bolo, Bruce Lee, and John. They were the only Chinese kids in the school, out of a thousand pupils. Bolo got his nickname because he looked like Bolo Yeung from the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Bloodsport. Bruce Lee’s name really was Bruce Lee, which made our lives. Here was this Chinese guy, quiet, good-looking, in great shape, and his name was Bruce Lee. We were like, This is magic. Thank you, Jesus, for bringing us Bruce Lee. John was just John, which was weird because of the other two. I got to know Bolo because he was one of my tuck-shop clients. Bolo’s parents were professional pirates. They pirated videogames and sold them at flea markets. As the son of pirates, Bolo did the same thing—he started selling bootleg PlayStation games around school. Kids would give him their PlayStation, and he’d bring it back a few days later with a chip in it that enabled them to play pirated games, which he would then sell them. Bolo was friends with this white kid and fellow pirate named Andrew, who traded in bootleg CDs. Andrew was two grades above me and a real computer geek; he even had a CD writer at home, back when nobody had CD writers. One day on my tuck-shop rounds, I overheard Andrew and Bolo complaining about the black kids at school. They’d realized that they could take Andrew’s and Bolo’s merchandise, say “I’ll pay you later,” and then not pay, because Andrew and Bolo were too scared of black people to go back to ask for the money. I leaned in to their conversation and said, “Listen, you shouldn’t get upset. Black people don’t have any money, so trying to get more stuff for less money is just what we do. But let me help. I’ll be your middleman. You give me the merchandise and I’ll sell it, and then I’ll handle getting the money. In return, you give me a cut of the sale.” They liked the idea right away, and we became partners. As the tuck-shop guy, I was perfectly positioned. I had my network set up. All I had to do was tap into it. With the money I made selling CDs and videogames, I was able to save up and add new components and more memory to my own computer. Andrew the computer geek showed me how to do it, where to buy the cheapest parts, how to assemble them, how to repair them. He showed me how his business worked, too, how to download music, where to get rewritable CDs in bulk.

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

  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. This particular Sunday, the Sunday I was hurled from a moving car, started out like any other Sunday. My mother woke me up, made me porridge for breakfast. I took my bath while she dressed my baby brother Andrew, who was nine months old. Then we went out to the driveway, but once we were finally all strapped in and ready to go, the car wouldn’t start. My mom had this ancient, broken-down, bright- tangerine Volkswagen Beetle that she picked up for next to nothing. The reason she got it for next to nothing was because it was always breaking down. To this day I hate secondhand cars. Almost everything that’s ever gone wrong in my life I can trace back to a secondhand car. Secondhand cars made me get detention for being late for school. Secondhand cars left us hitchhiking on the side of the freeway.

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

  The day of the event, we booked a minibus, loaded it up with our gear, and drove over. Once we arrived we waited in the back of the school’s assembly hall and watched the acts that went onstage before us, different groups took their turns performing, flamenco dancers, Greek dancers, traditional Zulu musicians. Then we were up. We were billed as the Hip Hop Pantsula Dancers—the South African B-Boys. We set up our sound system onstage. I looked out, and the whole hall was nothing but Jewish kids in their yarmulkes, ready to party. I got on the mic. “Are you ready to rock out?!” “Yeahhhhhh!” “Make some noise!” “Yeahhhhhh!” I started playing. The bass was bumping, my crew was dancing, and everyone was having a great time. The teachers, the chaperones, the parents, hundreds of kids—they were all dancing like crazy. Our set was scheduled for fifteen minutes, and at the ten-minute mark came the moment for me to play “Let’s Get Dirty,” bring out my star dancer, and shut shit down. I started the song, the dancers fanned out in their semicircle, and I got on the mic. “Are you guys ready?!” “Yeahhhhhh!” “You guys are not ready! Are you ready?!” “Yeeeaaahhhhhhhh!” “All right! Give it up and make some noise for HIIIIIITTTTLLLLEERRRRRRRRRR!!!” Hitler jumped out to the middle of the circle and started killing it. The guys around him were all chanting, “Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler!” They had their arms out in front of them, bouncing to the rhythm. “Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler!” And I was right there on the mic leading them along. “Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler!” The whole room stopped. No one was dancing. The teachers, the chaperones, the parents, the hundreds of Jewish kids in their yarmulkes—they froze and stared aghast at us up on the stage. I was oblivious. So was Hitler. We kept going. For a good thirty seconds the only sound in the room was the beat of the music and me on the mic yelling, “Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Put your hands in the air for Hitler, yo!” A teacher ran up behind me and yanked the plug for my system out of the wall. The hall went dead silent, and she turned on me and she was livid. “How dare you?! This is disgusting! You horrible, disgusting vile creature! How dare you?!”

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  “Jesus, Ed, you know what I did after I registered it downtown yesterday? I mean when I actually realized it was mine? I got on that bike and I rode it two hundred miles out and two hundred miles back.” ae Everyone roared. I nodded. “Something happened to me. I finally felt really free. I’m so excited. I love that bike. I mean, I actually love it. I love that bike so fucking much I can’t even explain it.’ All the butches who rode motorcycles nodded to themselves. Jan and Edwin clapped me on my shoulders. “Things are lookin’ up for you, kid. ’m happy for you,” Jan said. “Meg, set up another one for young Marlon Brando hete.” The ring must be working! ““The Avengers’ on yet?” I asked. Meg shook her head. “Fifteen more minutes. God, I can’t wait to see what Diana Rige’s wearing this time.” I sighed. “I hope it’s that leather jumpsuit again. I think I’m falling in love with her.” Meg laughed. “Get in line.” The place was starting to fill up. A young guy we'd never seen before came in and ordered a gin and tonic. Meg had just placed the glass in front of him when an older guy came in and flipped open a badge. Uniformed cops rushed in behind him. The young guy was a plant. “You've just served a minor. Alright ladies, gentlemen, leave your drinks on the bar and take out some ID, this is a bust.” Jan and Edwin each grabbed a handful of my shirt and dragged me out the back door. “Out of here, now, get out of here,” they were yelling as I fumbled with my motorcycle. A couple of cops fanned out around the parking lot. My legs felt like jelly. I couldn’t kick-start the bike. “Get the fuck out of here,” they shouted at me. Two uniformed cops headed toward me. One reached for his gun. “Off that bike,’ he ordered. “C’mon, cmon,” I crooned to myself. One good kick and the bike roared to life. I popped the clutch and did an unintentional wheelie out of the parking lot. As soon as I got to Toni and Betty’s house I banged on their kitchen door. Betty looked alarmed. “What’s wrong?” “The bat, everybody, they’re busted.” “Calm down,” Toni put her hand on my shoulder. “Calm down and tell us what happened.” I sputtered as I described the bust. “How can we find out what happened to everybody?” I asked them. “We'll find out soon enough, when that phone rings,” Betty said. The phone rang, Betty listened quietly. “Nobody got busted except Meg,” she told us. “Butch Jan and Ed got roughed up a little.” I rubbed my forehead with my hand. “Are they hurt bad?” She shrugged. I felt guilty. “I think they Stone Butch Blues 53 got it worse because they got me out of there.”