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 Cleanness (2020)

  Poetry! I exclaimed, sitting up straight in my chair, which had the effect I wanted; they all turned to me, silent, less obedient than bewildered. I looked at them a moment, a kind of caesura, and then I repeated it, Poetry, as though it were the obvious answer to a question, the answer they already knew. That’s what poets can do, I said, poets and artists; they give us ideas to buy into, for whole countries to buy into. Like Whitman, I said, whom they had all studied, he was part of the tenth-grade curriculum; my own tenth-graders were reading him now, Song of Myself, and I found it was a different poem because of the protests, which became the context for our reading, though I had read it dozens of times I read it differently now. Think of what he wants to do in that poem, I said, and when the country was at war with itself, absolutely broken; he wants to make an image of America anyone can buy into. Like that miraculous section, and I used that word, miraculous, I was getting excited, I was getting swept up in Whitman as I always did, it was what I loved about him and what I mistrusted, too, the feelings he could arouse that could swamp judgment. That section where all he does is name things, I said, well, not things, people, it’s just a list, he wants it to include everyone, he wants to find a place for everyone. An equal place, I went on, though I was talking too much now, and a place in his affection, too. There are those wonderful moments he puts in parentheses, like a whisper, do you remember, where he tells us he loves the person he’s just named. That’s what he thought democracy was, I said, a poem that named things and made an occasion for you to love them; he wanted to stitch America up, I said, he wanted to break all the divisions down. There’s only one time he does the opposite, it’s in that same list, where he puts a prostitute right next to the president, do you remember? None of them did, but they were paying attention, less interested maybe in the poem or what I was saying than in my excitement, which they observed like some freakish natural phenomenon, I thought. There’s a crowd making fun of the prostitute, I said, and that’s the one time Whitman separates himself, he says they laugh at you, but I do not laugh at you. And that’s the problem, I hurried on, that’s the problem with democracy, the danger of crowds, it’s the problem with the protests, too: how do you take a crowd and turn it into a populace, how do you take the voice of a crowd and turn it into the vox populi, the voice of a people. I glanced at the clock and saw that class was almost over, the bell would ring soon. People have to come together without losing their ability to think, Whitman calls it a “thoughtful merge,” the whole idea of democracy depends on it. And look, I don’t think a poem can do what he thought it could. He wanted his poem to be America, like magic, he wanted his poem to fix everything that was wrong with the country. Which was a lot! I said, trying to lighten the tone, which still is a lot, but what he did was to make an image of America that still feels like something I want to buy into, it still feels like the best image of ourselves. I stopped then, not knowing how to go on, and I was grateful when the bell rang, it let me raise my voice and say So go be poets, which released them from my overheated feeling and gave them permission to laugh.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  named Fangpu, perhaps the most zealous communist at school. Pale and thin and wearing glasses, Fangpu looked the type of the intellectual revolutionary. He was four years older than Jianhua, but they had bonded over their common love of literature and their desire to become writers. They had their differences—Fangpu’s poetry centered on political issues; he worshipped Chairman Mao Zedong and wanted to emulate not only his writings but also his revolutionary career. Jianhua, on the other hand, had little interest in politics, even though his father was a respected communist war veteran and government official. But they enjoyed their literary discussions, and Fangpu treated Jianhua like a younger brother. In May of 1966, as Jianhua was engrossed in his studies, preparing for the final exams to end his second year, Fangpu paid him a visit, and he seemed unusually animated. He had been scouring the Beijing newspapers to keep up with trends in the capital, and recently he had read of a literary debate started by several renowned intellectuals that he had to share with Jianhua. These intellectuals had accused well-known, respected writers of hiding counterrevolutionary messages in their plays, films, and magazine articles. They based these accusations on careful readings of certain passages in the writers’ work that could be seen as veiled criticisms of Mao himself. “Certain people are using art and literature to attack the party and socialism,” said Fangpu. This debate is about the future of the revolution, he said, and Mao must be behind it all. To Jianhua it all seemed a bit tedious and academic, but he trusted his older friend’s instincts, and he promised to follow the events in the newspaper. Fangpu’s words proved prophetic: within a week, papers throughout China had picked up the story of the raging debate. Teachers at YMS began to talk about some of the newspaper articles in their classes. One day the school’s Communist Party secretary, a paunchy man named Ding Yi, called for an assembly and gave a speech recounting almost verbatim an editorial against the counterrevolutionary writers. Something was definitely in the air. The students now had to devote so many hours every day to discussing the latest turns in the debate. Throughout Beijing, posters with large headlines had appeared everywhere attacking the “antiparty black line,” meaning those who were secretly trying to put the brakes on the communist revolution. Ding supplied the students with materials for making their own posters, and the students happily threw themselves into the task. They largely copied the posters from Beijing; Jianhua’s friend Zongwei, a talented artist, made the most attractive posters of all, with his elegant calligraphy. Within days, almost all of the walls of the school were covered with posters, and Secretary Ding roamed around the campus reading them, smiling and approving of the work. To Jianhua it was all quite novel and exciting, and he loved the new look of the campus walls. The campaign in Beijing focused on local intellectuals everyone

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Let’s go, Z. said, checking the time, and he set off quickly through the park, so that N. and I struggled to keep up. E, kopele, N. said, bastard, slow down, why are you rushing, and Z. turned and smiled, still walking, moving backward along the street. We don’t want to be late, we’ll miss the show, he said. He made a motion with his hips, a little Turkish shimmy, before he turned back around. The club was a short walk away, on Tsar Osvoboditel, part of a complex that housed one of the city’s most luxurious hotels. We showed our lichni karti to the two men stationed at the door, their torsos obscene with muscle, and then descended a long carpeted staircase that was lit dimly by red lights set high along the walls. There were mirrors mounted every few feet, and I found myself stealing glances as we passed, seeing how incongruous a group we made, wondering what people would make of my presence with these men so much younger than I, still boys really. The music got louder as we approached the glass doors separating the corridor from the club proper, and it overwhelmed me as Z. pulled them open and we stepped through into a cavernous, dark room strafed by lights that spun somewhere above us. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke, abrasive as sand, despite the new law that had passed months before; I could see it hanging beneath the only steady illumination, above the bar in the center of the room, where four men in identical black suits were mixing drinks. We made our way single file through the crowded space, toward the corner farthest from the entrance, where there were a few unclaimed tables, small and chest-high, each with an ashtray and an unopened bottle of gin. Nearer the bar people stood with bottles and glasses, moving their shoulders and hips, dancing in place. There wasn’t a dance floor, though what else could be the point of the place; the music was so loud it was almost impossible to talk, after only a minute of it my ears ached.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  “What the Scout Is determines his progress in whatever line of business he may seek success—and Scout Ideals mean progress in business.” Suggested good turns were enumerated on a ledger, so the Scout could check them off as he performed them: Assisted a foreign boy with some English grammar. Helped put out a burning field. Gave water to crippled dog . Here, even the murky enterprise of self-examination could be expressed as a problem in accounting. “On a scale of 100, what all-around rating would I be justified in giving myself?” I liked all these numbers and lists, because they offered the clear possibility of mastery. But what I liked best about the Handbook was its voice, the bluff hail-fellow language by which it tried to make being a good boy seem adventurous, even romantic. The Scout Spirit was traced to King Arthur’s Round Table, and from there to the explorers and pioneers and warriors whose conquests had been achieved through fair play and clean living. “No man given over to dissipation can stand the gaff. He quickly tires. He is the type who usually lacks courage at the crucial moment. He cannot take punishment and come back smiling.” I yielded easily to this comradely tone, forgetting while I did so that I was not the boy it supposed I was. Boy’s Life , the official Scout magazine, worked on me in the same way. I read it in a trance, accepting without question its narcotic invitation to believe that I was really no different from the boys whose hustle and pluck it celebrated. Boys who raised treasure from Spanish galleons, and put empty barns to use by building operational airplanes in them. Boys who skied to the North Pole. Boys who sailed around the Horn, solo. Boys who saved lives, and were accepted into savage tribes, and sent themselves to college by running traplines in the wilderness. Reading about these boys made me restless, feverish with schemes. My mother had allowed me to bring the Winchester to Chinook. When I was alone in the house I sometimes dressed up in my Scout uniform, slung the rifle across my back, and practiced Indian sign language in front of the mirror. Hungry . Brother . Food . Want . Great Mystery . MY MOTHER FINALLY gave Dwight a date in March. Once he knew she was coming he began to talk about his plans for renovating the house, but he drank at night and didn’t get anything done. A couple of weeks before she quit her job he brought home a trunkful of paint in five-gallon cans. All of it was white. Dwight spread out his tarps and for several nights running we stayed up late painting the ceilings and walls. When we had finished those, Dwight looked around, saw that it was good, and kept going. He painted the coffee table white. He painted all the beds white, and the chests of drawers, and the dining-room table.

• From Enchanted: Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women (Erotic Fiction) (2006)

  “That’s it,” he groaned with pleasure. “If you want it you’re going to have to work for it.” Her face burned when she heard these words, but the distress between her legs was becoming urgent, so what could she do? Mrs. Wolfe worked with all her might to please Mr. Fox, licking and sucking as cleverly as she was capable and even using her hands too, just as he had done, so that she might earn her reward. She sucked and slurped until she was certain she had never done it so well, and she even thought up some new things that she hadn’t thought of before; such was her desire to win the pleasures Mr. Fox dangled before her. And it occurred to her that this, too, was causing her loins to ache even more painfully than Mr. Fox’s clever administrations had. But, oh, how much longer until she would be granted relief? Tears filled her eyes as she continued to labor before him, nearly choking herself in her efforts to please him. Mr. Fox was a firm believer in self-control as we have established, but he was not a machine, and his body also had its limitations. He abruptly stopped the suckling therefore, lest he should shame himself and disappoint his partner after all her commendable efforts. He said, “You have well earned your reward!” And he pulled her onto his throbbing body. Mrs. Wolfe moaned loudly as her body was lowered onto his. It felt so good to finally have him sliding into her! At last the ache between her legs started to recede a bit as she wiggled herself up and down and forward and back, trying to get the feeling just right. Mr. Fox was fondling and pinching her breasts, but as Mrs. Wolfe’s movements became more frenzied he moved one hand down between her legs and began to help her. She gasped and moaned, once again amazed by how clever Mr. Fox was. His fingers were much more effective than her rubbing had been and she slowed her own movements to a mere rocking motion and allowed his talented fingers to do the rest. She rocked and ground her hips forward and back as his fingers twisted and teased. With his other hand he pinched the tips of her breasts. Mrs. Wolfe was unused to this gentler style of intercourse. Her husband’s more vigorous attentions revealed to her his attraction and need. Mr. Fox’s absolute composure seemed almost like indifference by comparison, even if it did enhance the pleasure considerably. She closed her eyes and imagined her husband ravishing poor Mrs. Fox and this brought about a most shattering conclusion to her painstaking efforts of the evening.

• From Enchanted: Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women (Erotic Fiction) (2006)

  Suddenly I felt my husband near me. He pushed me forward slightly, maneuvering me, I knew, so that I was in the exact position that she had been in. When I was settled like he wanted, my head and forearms rested on the floor, and my knees rested on the ottoman, spread wide apart. In this position my hips were forced impossibly high into the air and opened very wide. Terror and manic excitement made me light-headed, giving me a dreamlike impression of those first few moments. But when I felt his hands grasping my hips in readiness for what was coming, I suddenly became acutely aware of everything around me. It seemed that all my senses were heightened, so that every detail appeared magnified and distinct. I held my breath as I felt my husband’s hardness pressing against my nether opening. My hips instinctively contracted, wanting to close and move forward to escape him. But both my position and his grasp on my hips would allow no such escape, and so I was obliged to remain still as he forced himself into me. In spite of my good intentions, I cried out. My husband immediately stopped. He did not withdraw, but he held himself perfectly still where he was. There were tears of disappointment in my eyes. I had not expected that first, stinging pain. But in the very next moment the sting began to subside. Even so, it was still terribly uncomfortable. Notwithstanding the pain and discomfort, I was still amazingly aroused. And I was far from ready to give up on the experience. I can’t stop now, I thought. I have come too far. Besides, if she could do it, I can too! With renewed determination, I arched my back, pushing my hips upward and opening myself further to my husband. He groaned when I did this, and his fingers dug into my flesh. He advanced very slowly, carefully urging himself into me, and I could tell from his groans that he was using every bit of restraint he possessed to go slowly. Even so, I had to bite my lip to avoid crying out again. But at last he was fully inside me. The combination of shock, excitement, and discomfort was like nothing I had ever experienced before. As I became accustomed to the discomfort, I almost felt disappointment, so exquisite had that aspect of the intimacy been for me. He withdrew gradually and then once again pushed himself forward slowly. He was being very careful and gentle because it was me. But I did not want to be me tonight. I wanted to be her. If I were really going to feel what she felt, all this tenderness would have to go. “Do you like it?” I asked my husband, as he continued to move in and out of me slowly. “Yes,” he moaned. “Do you like mine as much as you liked hers?” I pressed. “Better!”

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  “No, madam,” I said to the woman in my ESL English. “That’s my mom. I came out her asshole and I love her very much. I am seven. Next year I will be eight. I’m doing fine. I feel good how about you? Merry Christmas Happy New Year.” The deluge was exactly eighty percent of the language I knew at the time and I shivered in pure delight as the words flew out of me. You believed, like many Vietnamese mothers, that to speak of female genitalia, especially between mothers and sons, is considered taboo—so when talking about birth, you always mentioned that I had come out of your anus. You would playfully slap my head and say, “This huge noggin nearly tore up my asshole!” Startled, her perm throbbing, the clerk turned and clacked away on her heels. You looked down at me. “What the hell did you say?” — In 1966, in between his two tours in Vietnam, Earl Dennison Woods, a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army, was stationed in Thailand. There, he met Kultida Punsawad, a Thai native and secretary for the US Army office in Bangkok. After dating for a year, Earl and Kultida moved to Brooklyn, New York, where, in 1969, they got married. Earl would return to Vietnam for one final tour, from 1970 to 1971, right before American involvement in the conflict began to decline. By the time Saigon fell, Earl officially retired from military service to begin his new life, and most important, raise his new son—born only six months after the last US helicopter lifted from the American embassy in Saigon. The boy’s birth name, according to an ESPN profile I read a while back, was Eldrick Tont Woods. His first name a unique formulation of the E in “Earl” and ending in the K in “Kultida.” His parents, whose home in Brooklyn was often vandalized due to their interracial marriage, decided to stand at each end of their son’s name, like pillars. Eldrick’s middle name, Tont, is a traditional Thai name given to him by his mother. However, shortly after his birth, the boy obtained a nickname that would soon become famous across the globe. Eldrick “Tiger” Woods, one of the greatest golfers in the world is, like you, Ma, a direct product of the war in Vietnam. — Paul and I are in his garden harvesting fresh basil for a pesto recipe he promised to teach me. We successfully avoid talking about the past, having brushed by it earlier that morning. We talk, instead, of cage-free eggs. He pauses from his picking, pulls his cap over his brow and lectures, with steeled intensity, on how antibiotics cause infections in commercially farmed hens, that the bees are dying and how, without them, the country would lose its entire food supply in less than three months, how you should cook olive oil on low heat because burning it would release free radicals that cause cancer.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  “Bill,” Roy said. “Bill. Bill.” He turned silent again, staring down at the fly in the vise, his hands on the table. I finished off my Pepsi and went outside. While my mother and I ate breakfast the next morning Roy carried fishing gear and camping equipment out to the Jeep. He was lashing down something in back when I left for school. I yelled “Good luck!” and he waved at me, and I never saw him again either. My mother was in the apartment when I got home that day, folding clothes into a suitcase that lay open on her bed. Two other suitcases were already packed full. She was singing to herself. Her color was high, her movements quick and sure, everything about her flushed with gaiety. I knew we were on our way the moment I heard her voice, even before I saw the suitcases. She asked me why I wasn’t at archery. There was no suspicion behind the question. “They canceled it,” I told her. “Great,” she said. “Now I won’t have to go looking for you. Why don’t you check your room and make sure I’ve got everything.” “We going somewhere?” “Yes.” She smoothed out a dress. “We sure are.” “Where?” She laughed. “I don’t know. Any suggestions?” “Phoenix,” I said immediately. She didn’t ask why. She hung the dress in a garment bag and said, “That’s a real coincidence, because I was thinking about Phoenix myself. I even got the Phoenix paper. They have lots of opportunities there. Seattle too. What do you think about Seattle?” I sat down on the bed. It was starting to take hold of me too, the giddiness of flight. My knees shook and I felt myself grin. Everything was racing. I said, “What about Roy?” She kept on packing. “What about him?” “I don’t know. Is he coming too?” “Not if I can help it, he isn’t.” She said she hoped that was okay with me. I didn’t answer. I was afraid of saying something she would remember if they got back together. But I was glad to be once more on the run and glad that I would have her to myself again. “I know you two are close,” she said. “Not that close.” She said there wasn’t time to explain everything now, but later on she would. She tried to sound serious, but she was close to laughing and so was I. “Better check your room,” my mother said again. “When are we leaving?” “Right away. As soon as we can.” I ate a bowl of soup while my mother finished packing. She carried the suitcases into the front hall and then walked down to the corner to call a cab. That was when I remembered the rifle. I went to the closet and saw it there with Roy’s things, his boots and jackets and ammo boxes. I carried the rifle to the living room and waited for my mother to come back.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  One of them was a strange docility, almost paralysis, with men of the tyrant breed. Another was a contradictory hatred of coercion. She’d never been able to spank me. The few times she tried I came away laughing. She couldn’t even raise her voice convincingly. That wasn’t the way she wanted to be with me, and she didn’t think I needed it anyway. Marian thought otherwise. Sometimes at night I heard the two of them arguing about me, Marian strident, my mother quiet and implacable. It was just the age I was going through, she said. I’d grow out of it. I was a good boy. ON HALLOWEEN, TAYLOR and Silver and I broke out some windows in the school cafeteria. The next day two policemen came to school and several boys with bad reputations were called out of class to talk to them. Nobody thought of us, not even of Taylor, who had a recorded history of window breaking. The reason nobody thought of us was that at school, in the presence of really tough kids who got into fights and talked back to teachers, we were colorless and mild. At the end of the day the principal came on the public address system and announced that the guilty parties had been identified. Before taking action, however, he wanted to give these individuals a chance to come forward on their own. A voluntary confession now would work greatly in their favor later on. Taylor and Silver and I avoided looking at each other. We knew it was a bluff, because we’d been in the same classroom all day long. Otherwise the trick would have worked. We didn’t trust each other, and any suspicion that one of us was weakening would have created a stampede of betrayal. We got away with it. A week later we came back after a movie to break some more windows, then chickened out when a car turned into the parking lot and sat there with its engine running for a few minutes before driving away. Instead of making us more careful, the interest of the police in what we’d done elated us. We became selfimportant, cocksure, insane in our arrogance. We broke windows. We broke streetlights. We opened the doors of cars parked on hills and released the emergency brakes so they smashed into the cars below. We set bags of shit on fire and left them on doorsteps, but people didn’t stamp them out as they were supposed to do; instead they waited with weary expressions as the bags burned, now and then looking up to scan the shadows from which they felt us watching them. We did these things in darkness and in the light of day, moving always to the sound of breaking glass and yowling cats and grinding metal. And we stole. At first we stole as part of our general hoodlum routine, and for Taylor and Silver it never had any more importance than that.

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

  316The History of Christianity II widespread literacy, and healthcare. This would ideally be an infrastructure that didn’t require too much government investment and was free from Catholic control. õTherefore, it was convenient that these early missionaries from the brand-new Bible Societies of Britain and the United States were keen to go around founding schools and hospitals. If they wanted to use their Protestant Bibles as teaching aids, the liberals thought that was a reasonable price to pay. õThe Protestant missionaries became dependent on liberals in government, and all the while conservative Catholics were fuming, labeling these foreign Protestants as agents of godlessness and political pawns. For example, when an American missionary founded the first Protestant church in Chile, in the 1850s, the local Catholic authorities insisted that the church be surrounded by a high wall. TWENTIETH-CENTURY REVIVAL õAt the end of the late 19 th century, Latin American Protestantism was a fairly small, urban movement. This began to change in the 20 th century. On the eve of the new year in 1909, a revival began in a Methodist church in Valparaíso, Chile. õAn American missionary named Willis Hoover was pastor there, and he’d heard stories about some of the international revivals inspired by the big one on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. A friend had given his wife a booklet about a big revival in India in 1906 that probably introduced him to the idea of “baptism in the Holy Spirit” and speaking in tongues.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  When she told me she couldn’t have lunch with me because she had a prior commitment, I asked, ‘What about dinner tonight?’—again without even checking my date book. ‘Sure,’ she said and asked me to dine at her home. She lived alone, she said, and had planned to cook a mushroom ragout with some chanterelles she had picked the day before from the Mount Tamalpais forest.” “And you did?” “Did I? Most assuredly I did. And it was one of the premier evenings of my life—at least, up to a momentous point.” He paused, shaking his head as he had when his memory had first returned to him, then went on, “It was extraordinary being with her. Everything flowed naturally. Legendary dinner—what a marvelous cook. And I’d brought some first-class California wine, a Stag’s Leap cabernet. And then after dessert, a first-rate British trifle—the first I’ve seen in this country—she brought out some marijuana. I hesitated but decided, ‘When in California, live as the natives,’ and I took the first puff of my life.” A befuddled look on his face, Halston paused. “And?” Ernest prodded. “And then, after we cleared the dishes, I began to feel a warm, pleasant glow.” Another pause, another headshake. “And?” “That was when the most extraordinary thing happened—she asked me if I wanted to go to bed with her. Just like that, all matter-of-fact, She was so natural, so graceful, so—so—I don’t know—adult. None of that typical American ‘Will she or won’t she?’ melodrama I detest.” Good Lord! Ernest thought. What a woman; what an evening! Lucky man! Then, glancing again at the clock, he hurried Halston along. “You said it was one of the great evenings of your life—but only up to some momentous point?” “Yes; the sex was sheer ecstasy. Extraordinary. Unlike any I’ve ever even imagined.” “How so extraordinary?” “It’s all still a bit of a haze, but I remember her licking me like a kitten, every square centimeter, head to toe, until every pore on my body was gaping open, begging for more, tingling with delight, receptive to her touch, her tongue, drinking in her scent and warmth.” He stopped. “I’m a bit embarrassed expressing all this, Doctor.” “Halston, you’re doing exactly what you should be doing here. Try to continue.” “Well, the pleasure just kept spiraling up. It was unworldly, I tell you. The head of my—my—what do you say?—organ—lit up, hotter and hotter, until I had an absolutely incandescent orgasm. And then I think I passed out.” Ernest was amazed.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Poetry! I exclaimed, sitting up straight in my chair, which had the effect I wanted; they all turned to me, silent, less obedient than bewildered. I looked at them a moment, a kind of caesura, and then I repeated it, Poetry, as though it were the obvious answer to a question, the answer they already knew. That’s what poets can do, I said, poets and artists; they give us ideas to buy into, for whole countries to buy into. Like Whitman, I said, whom they had all studied, he was part of the tenth-grade curriculum; my own tenth-graders were reading him now, Song of Myself, and I found it was a different poem because of the protests, which became the context for our reading, though I had read it dozens of times I read it differently now. Think of what he wants to do in that poem, I said, and when the country was at war with itself, absolutely broken; he wants to make an image of America anyone can buy into. Like that miraculous section, and I used that word, miraculous, I was getting excited, I was getting swept up in Whitman as I always did, it was what I loved about him and what I mistrusted, too, the feelings he could arouse that could swamp judgment. That section where all he does is name things, I said, well, not things, people, it’s just a list, he wants it to include everyone, he wants to find a place for everyone. An equal place, I went on, though I was talking too much now, and a place in his affection, too. There are those wonderful moments he puts in parentheses, like a whisper, do you remember, where he tells us he loves the person he’s just named. That’s what he thought democracy was, I said, a poem that named things and made an occasion for you to love them; he wanted to stitch America up, I said, he wanted to break all the divisions down. There’s only one time he does the opposite, it’s in that same list, where he puts a prostitute right next to the president, do you remember? None of them did, but they were paying attention, less interested maybe in the poem or what I was saying than in my excitement, which they observed like some freakish natural phenomenon, I thought. There’s a crowd making fun of the prostitute, I said, and that’s the one time Whitman separates himself, he says they laugh at you, but I do not laugh at you. And that’s the problem, I hurried on, that’s the problem with democracy, the danger of crowds, it’s the problem with the protests, too: how do you take a crowd and turn it into a populace, how do you take the voice of a crowd and turn it into the vox populi, the voice of a people. I glanced at the clock and saw that class was almost over, the bell would ring soon. People have to come together without losing their ability to think, Whitman calls it a “thoughtful merge,” the whole idea of democracy depends on it. And look, I don’t think a poem can do what he thought it could. He wanted his poem to be America, like magic, he wanted his poem to fix everything that was wrong with the country. Which was a lot! I said, trying to lighten the tone, which still is a lot, but what he did was to make an image of America that still feels like something I want to buy into, it still feels like the best image of ourselves. I stopped then, not knowing how to go on, and I was grateful when the bell rang, it let me raise my voice and say So go be poets, which released them from my overheated feeling and gave them permission to laugh.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  gay murderer targets only gay men, is that gay murderer himself homophobic? This question is something of a snake eating its own tail, and I cannot dig myself out. Dream House as Road Trip to Everywhere It is July. Iowa in July is nothing but drama: wet heat, tornado warnings, thunderstorms so violent you have to pull the car over. Mosquitoes flock to you; your legs are swollen with their needs. You plan your trip: Iowa to Boston, Boston to New York. In Boston she’ll show you her old stomping grounds; in New York you’ll both get to spend time with Val. Then New York to Allentown so she can meet your parents, Allentown to DC to meet your college friends, DC to northern Virginia for one of your oldest friend’s wedding, and then down to Florida so you can meet her parents. The idea of the open road lights you up. You have always adored driving great distances across your country: it is the only time you ever feel any kind of patriotism. Her parents don’t want you to drive. They worry about accidents; they beg you both to fly. You come to a compromise: you will drive to DC and fly to Florida from there. They pay for your tickets. Every step of the trip is sweet and sour. While you drive you slip your hand between her legs, jerk her off as you zip past cornfields and stopped traffic. (She is hot; you are stupid.) You fight near a rest stop in Illinois about, of all things, a Beyoncé song. (“If the lyrics were about how men ruled the world,” she says to you, “you’d hate this song.”) When she kisses you in a McDonald’s parking lot in Indiana, you both look up to see a group of men—a risk of men, a murder of men—standing there watching, laughing, pointing. One man does that tongue-waggle-through-the-fingers thing, which you have never seen anyone do in real life. You fly out of there as fast as you can; you don’t even buckle your seat belt until you’re back on the interstate. Dream House as Accident In Boston your friend Sam—who you still think of by his college nickname, Big Sam—overhears her making you cry, and acts cold and distant to her even though you just want him to pretend like he didn’t hear anything.

• From Post Office (1971)

  THEY WON’T HIRE ME BECAUSE THEY LOOK AT ME AND THEY SEE HOW INTELLIGENT I AM AND THEY THINK, WELL, AN INTELLIGENT MAN LIKE HIM WON’T STAY WITH US, SO THERE’S NO USE HIRING HIM.” “I still say, go to a small room and write.” “BUT I NEED ASSURANCE!” “It’s a good thing a few others didn’t think that way. It’s a good thing Van Gogh didn’t think that way.” “VAN GOGH’S BROTHER GAVE HIM FREE PAINTS!” the kid said to me. FOUR1Then I developed a new system at the racetrack. I pulled in $3,000 in a month and a half while only going to the track two or three times a week. I began to dream. I saw a little house down by the sea. I saw myself in fine clothing, calm, getting up mornings, getting into my imported car, making the slow easy drive to the track. I saw leisurely steak dinners, preceded and followed by good chilled drinks in colored glasses. The big tip. The cigar. And women as you wanted them. It’s easy to fall into this kind of thinking when men hand you large bills at the cashier’s window. When in one six-furlong race, say in a minute and nine seconds, you make a month’s pay. So I stood in the tour superintendent’s office. There he was behind his desk. I had a cigar in my mouth and whiskey on my breath. I felt like money. I looked like money. “Mr. Winters,” I said, “the post office has treated me well. But I have outside business interests that simply must be taken care of. If you can’t give me a leave of absence, I must resign.” “Didn’t I give you a leave of absence earlier in the year, Chinaski?” “No, Mr. Winters, you turned down my request for a leave of absence. This time there can’t be any turndown. Or I will resign.” “All right, fill out the form and I’ll sign it. But I can only give you 90 working days off.” “I’ll take ’em,” I said, exhaling a long trail of blue smoke from my expensive cigar. 2The track had moved down the coast a hundred miles or so. I kept paying the rent on my apartment in town, got in my car and drove down. Once or twice a week I would drive back to the apartment, check the mail, maybe sleep overnight, then drive back down. It was a good life, and I started winning. After the last race each night I would have one or two easy drinks at the bar, tipping the bartender well. It looked like a new life. I could do no wrong. One night I didn’t even watch the last race. I went to the bar. Fifty dollars to win was my standard bet. After you bet 50 win awhile it feels like betting five or 10 win. “Scotch and water,” I told the barkeep.

• From Post Office (1971)

  2 The track had moved down the coast a hundred miles or so. I kept paying the rent on my apartment in town, got in my car and drove down. Once or twice a week I would drive back to the apartment, check the mail, maybe sleep overnight, then drive back down. It was a good life, and I started winning. After the last race each night I would have one or two easy drinks at the bar, tipping the bartender well. It looked like a new life. I could do no wrong. One night I didn’t even watch the last race. I went to the bar. Fifty dollars to win was my standard bet. After you bet 50 win awhile it feels like betting five or 10 win. “Scotch and water,” I told the barkeep. “Think I’ll listen to this one over the speaker.” “Who you got?” “Blue Stocking,” I told him “50 win.” “Too much weight.” “Are you kidding? A good horse can pack 122 pounds in a six thousand dollar claimer. That means, according to the conditions, that the horse has done something that no other horse in that race has done.” Of course, that wasn’t the reason I had bet Blue Stocking. I was always giving out misinformation. I didn’t want anybody else on board. At the time, they didn’t have closed circuit t.v. You just listened to the calls. I was $380 ahead. A loss on the last race would give me a $330 profit. A good day’s work. We listened. The caller mentioned every horse in the race but Blue Stocking. My horse must have fallen down, I thought. They were in the stretch, coming down toward the wire. That track was notorious for its short stretch. Then right before the race ended the announcer screamed, “AND HERE COMES BLUE STOCKING ON THE OUTSIDE! BLUE STOCKING IS GETTING UP! IT’S ... BLUE STOCKING!” “Pardon me,” I told the bartender, “I’ll be right back. Fix me a scotch and water, double shot.” “Yes, sir!” he said. I went out back where they had a small tote board near the walking ring. Blue Stocking read 9/2. Well it wasn’t eight or 10 to one. But you played the winner, not the price. I’d take the $250 profit plus change. I went back to the bar. “Who do you like tomorrow, sir?” asked the barkeep. “Tomorrow’s a long way off,” I told him. I finished my drink, tipped him a dollar and walked off.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  His building wasn’t far, but he was right, it would have been difficult to find. There had been a plan here once, in Communist times, the huge blokove erected at intervals to leave green spaces between, parks and playgrounds, the remnants of which we passed through now. But any sense of order had been lost, the parks had been paved over, new buildings had sprung up in every empty space. Cars were parked on sidewalks, in the little alleys between buildings, on both sides of the road; drivers had to thread their way through the streets single file, cells in a clogged artery. He walked ahead, not speaking or looking back, moving quickly because of the rain, though maybe it was eagerness too, I thought, maybe he felt the excitement I felt, the blood rushing to my groin. I’ll use you hard, I had written, after he told me what he wanted, get ready, I’ll make you take it. It isn’t easy to find men who will say that, the idea of it frightens them or turns them off; when finally I found someone to say it to me there was excitement but also gratitude and relief, maybe he was feeling that. Even in his hoodie it was clear how slim he was, he kept his hands in the pockets at the front and pulled the fabric tight around him, showing off his frame, and he wore tight jeans that advertised his legs and ass, which I found myself watching as we walked. It was the only condition I had set, that I didn’t want to come in his ass; I want to shoot in your mouth, I had said, in your mouth and on your face. Really I wasn’t sure I wanted to fuck him at all, I worried about disease, and the longer I fucked him the more danger there would be. Danger for him, too; I got tested every six months but I wasn’t always careful, I wasn’t fanatically safe. On his profile he had chosen the third option, not negative or positive but don’t know, and in the text he had said he didn’t care about status, anyone was welcome, he didn’t want to know. People always lie, he would say to me later, why bother to ask, why should I believe them, why should I care.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  He’s in the bag.” Dwight said that all I had to do was sidestep when Arthur came at me, then uppercut him to the jaw. It was that simple: sidestep, uppercut. Using the peculiar patience, almost tenderness, that he reserved for instruction in combat, Dwight rehearsed this move with me several times before the smoker. I learned it but I didn’t believe in it, any more than I believed in the moves I’d been shown by my other counselors. I didn’t think I had a snowball’s chance in hell against Arthur unless I threw strategy aside and went absolutely berserk, as he was sure to do. EACH FIGHT CONSISTED of three one-minute rounds. All the fighters waited together in the locker room until Mr. Mitchell called them out. The locker room was dimly lit. We didn’t talk. Except for the real heavies we looked almost frail in our big gloves and oversized, billowing shorts. A few boys lay back on the benches, their forearms over their eyes. The rest of us sat hunched with our gloves on our knees and stared at the floor, listening to the noise in the gym. The roar was steady, almost mechanically so, except when it fell off during the breaks between rounds and when it rose during what must have been particularly violent passages in the fight then under way. At these times the roar became almost palpable. We raised our heads, then lowered them again as the sound ebbed. Every five minutes or so the door would swing open and two more boys would go out, passing on their way the sweating, gasping wrecks whose fight had just ended. Arthur and I had a long wait. We sat at opposite ends of the locker room and didn’t look at each other. Boys came and went. I had questions about what I was doing here, and what was to come. I entered a trance of perplexity and apprehension. Then I heard my name, and jumped to my feet, and ran outside into the gym with Arthur behind me. The lights dazzled my eyes. I saw the people in the stands only as a mass of color. They roared when we ran out, and the sound was even louder than I’d thought it would be, a thrilling pagan din that washed the fear clean out of me. We went to our corners and Mr. Mitchell introduced us as two boys with bad blood between us, which, by now, we were. I raised my gloves at the sound of my name and the stands roared again. That was when I realized that I was invincible. I was going to give him a beating, the beating of his life, and I couldn’t wait to start. The bell rang and we went at it. MY MOTHER WOULD hardly talk to me on the drive home that night, she was so appalled. She refused to understand that I’d really had to fight, that there was no choice.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  None of them did, but they were paying attention, less interested maybe in the poem or what I was saying than in my excitement, which they observed like some freakish natural phenomenon, I thought. There’s a crowd making fun of the prostitute, I said, and that’s the one time Whitman separates himself, he says they laugh at you, but I do not laugh at you. And that’s the problem, I hurried on, that’s the problem with democracy, the danger of crowds, it’s the problem with the protests, too: how do you take a crowd and turn it into a populace, how do you take the voice of a crowd and turn it into the vox populi, the voice of a people. I glanced at the clock and saw that class was almost over, the bell would ring soon. People have to come together without losing their ability to think, Whitman calls it a “thoughtful merge,” the whole idea of democracy depends on it. And look, I don’t think a poem can do what he thought it could. He wanted his poem to be America, like magic, he wanted his poem to fix everything that was wrong with the country. Which was a lot! I said, trying to lighten the tone, which still is a lot, but what he did was to make an image of America that still feels like something I want to buy into, it still feels like the best image of ourselves. I stopped then, not knowing how to go on, and I was grateful when the bell rang, it let me raise my voice and say So go be poets, which released them from my overheated feeling and gave them permission to laugh. The sun had fully set now, and between the streetlamps in the park at NDK there was utter darkness. We passed the entrance to the underground passageway, where there was a metro stop now, still new, and also the toilets where men went for sex, where I had spent so many weekend evenings; walking with my student I felt the weird dissonance of my private and public lives. M. had been walking quietly, listening to the sound of the drums that drifted back to us from the front of the march. People weren’t shouting as we walked through the park at NDK, the mood was restrained, contemplative, a little respite from the noise. Some people had let their signs drop in the dark, tucking them under their arms, but others still held them aloft, and I saw that several people were wearing glow bracelets, little rings of light that hovered over their heads. I asked M. if she usually came with friends, if there were many students marching from the school.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  A couple of blocks ahead the march had turned another corner, and this created a kind of bottleneck, slowing everything down further. The street was poorly lit, we were in darkness again, and now there were more police; they lined one side of the street, with their helmets on and their plastic shields raised. What’s going on, I asked M., and she told me that we were approaching the headquarters of the Socialist Party, that every night the march took that route. There was another battery of air horns ahead of us, not as loud as the first but loud enough, the sound reverberated in the little street. It was an old street, with elegant, turn-of-the-century houses and even older dwellings, squat and unadorned, which had escaped the bombs of World War II and the building initiatives of the Communists and now were on the point of collapse. We were packed together now, barely moving though I still felt the impulse to move, the impulse of the crowd behind me. We were penned in, almost brushing shoulders with the people beside us, and I felt M. draw closer to me. We inched forward, and then the noise began again just in front of us, and everyone around me started shouting as they turned to face a long building of concrete and glass, five or six stories high. Only the sculpture in front of it marked it out, I had passed it before without paying much attention to the building it adorned. It showed seven or eight figures in battle, some taking aim with rifles, others cradling fallen comrades, the whole dominated by a large, stylized figure of a woman on one knee, her arm flung forward, the fingers outstretched in a gesture that had always seemed moving to me, more moving now that she was outlined by the single lit window of a convenience store behind her. The march had come to a standstill, people were yelling cherveni boklutsi again and again as they shook their fists, suddenly a man standing right beside me sounded his air horn. Jesus, I must have said, covering my ear and shaking my head a little like an animal, and M. looked up at me, concerned.

• From Stripped: Las Vegas (2021)

  [Galaxciii yelling] [chattering] My first night dancing, I made $200 and I was doped [laughs], I was so excited. [upbeat music] - When I first started making money, it was coming really quick because, like I said, I knew how to pole dance already. And that was my thing. [audience cheering] [upbeat music] I realized very quickly that my body talks to my customers. I learned that that was my moneymaker. The money was flying, it was coming in really quick. My first $1,000 I think I made on my second or third night. [money rustling] So, I knew I was just destined for Vegas. [vehicle droning] - I was in five AP classes my senior year of high school, and the AP tests were expensive, and I needed to get a job to pay for them. [upbeat music] So I started dancing when I was 17 at a bar in my town. They asked me if I was 18, I said, yes, they didn't check ID, so it wound up working out. And it opened me up to a lot of experiences performing that I probably wouldn't have gotten otherwise. I was spitting fire, I was dancing on bars. I was learning the basics of pole dancing. My second year of college, I started dancing at a very small club. It was a pretty tight knit group of girls. It was the first time I had a group of girlfriends that I really could be myself with. [women laughing] - As far as the girls in the strip club, don't trust those bitches, do not trust those bitches. I'm not your friend, she's not your friend. We're all here for one reason, one reason only, it's crabs in a bucket. [upbeat music] Bitches are sneaky. [upbeat music] It wasn't too hard to transition from my cheer dance background to stripping. If anything, it made it easier. I was already flexible, I had already knew how to hold my weight, and I was already strong, so climbing the pole was extremely easy. I've been stripping ever since. - Growing up having this love for dance, I was always open to the idea of going into striping. And so, finally I met my friend who was a stripper at the time. And honestly, she got me to the club the next night. I just needed somebody to kind of kick my ass through the door and kind of help me, guide me through it. [upbeat music] I wasn't particularly nervous about the dancing in front of people or taking my clothes off in front of people, I was very comfortable in myself. I was more nervous about this whole unknown industry that was so looked down upon and kind of being uninsured of what I was stepping into. [upbeat music] - When I'm dancing, it's like I'm in a whole different space. It's like I'm in a whole different body. [upbeat music] Most of my clientele are women.