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 Vox (1992)

  We got to the scene where the guy with the wide yellow tie with a dollar sign on it has sex with the heroine. She says something like, ‘Don’t play around, just fuck me,’ and so he does. This scene really got to Emily, and she took the blanket in her teeth so she could have both hands free and yet have it over her, so now there were these loomings as her left hand moved back and forth between breasts, and the little circling rhythm was slightly less constrained.” “What were you doing?”

• From Vox (1992)

  So I told her that I, well er um, I was interested, you know, in sitting on my couch, next to a woman, with an X-rated tape on, and the woman’s looking only at the movie and I’m looking only at the movie, and she’s well, um, masturbating, and as she starts to come she says, ‘Look at my face,’ and I look at her face, and she looks at the TV, and we both come. So she says, Emily says, ‘All right, good, now we have something to work from.’ She takes out a pen and starts drafting the ad on the place mat, she writes, ‘You and me are sitting,’ and she goes, ‘Good, okay so far, nice colloquial note, that’s fine.’ I think she was really delighted not to be talking about Lee. And then she taps the pen on the place mat and she looks up at me and she says, ‘No, look, you need to make the situation a lot clearer. You need to make her feel that it’s all right. You need to talk about some kind of a blanket.’ Out of the blue, a blanket! No, wait, I know what she said, before the blanket, she said something like, ‘You need to make the woman reading it understand that some sense of what is right and fitting coexists alongside your depravities.’ Not those exact words, but close to that. You believe it? Then she brings up this blanket. This was a whole new side to her. I said, ‘All righty, what kind of blanket? You think we should specify the actual kind of blanket?’ And she nods and goes, ‘Yes, absolutely, the specific kind of blanket, the size, the thickness, the color, that’s all they have to go on.’ I said, ‘Okay, well, what do you think? Army surplus green blanket, Mormon quilt, what?’ She thought for a second, and then she said, she said, ‘I think you should mention a blanket with a fringe.’ I said, ‘But I do not have a blanket with a fringe.’ And she said, ‘You’re right, that’s a problem.’ And then she starts hitting me with all these questions. She goes, ‘How far is the TV from the couch?’ She’d never been to my apartment, of course. I said, ‘Well it’s on a rolling table, so there’s no fixed distance, but then, the cable cord limits the range, so I guess it’s probably about six feet from the couch.’ She noted this down and she goes, ‘Because the woman skimming these personals may need to know that. That little fact might be of the highest importance. Now, is the couch two pillows wide or three pillows wide or four pillows wide?’

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  taxes and social security, I’d be taking home over eighty dollars a week. I had spent a lot of time imagining what New York would be like, but the one thing that had never occurred to me was that the opportunities would come so easily. Aside from having to wear those embarrassing red-and-yellow uniforms with matching floppy hats, I loved the job. The lunch and dinner rushes were always exciting, with the lines backing up at the counter, the cashiers shouting orders over the microphones, the grill guys shoveling hamburgers through the flame-broiling conveyer belt, everyone running from the fixings counter to the drinks station to the infrared fries warmer, staying on top of the orders, the manager jumping in to help whenever a crisis cropped up. We got 20 percent off on our meals, and for the first few weeks there, I had a cheeseburger and a chocolate milk shake every day for lunch. • • • In the middle of the summer, Lori found us an apartment in a neighborhood we could afford—the South Bronx. The yellow art deco building must have been pretty fancy when it opened, but now graffiti covered the outside walls, and the cracked mirrors in the lobby were held together with duct tape. Still, it had what Mom called good bones. Our apartment was bigger than the entire house on Little Hobart Street, and way fancier. It had shiny oak parquet floors, a foyer with two steps leading down into the living room—where I slept—and, off to the side, a bedroom that became Lori’s. We also had a kitchen with a working refrigerator and a gas stove that had a pilot light, so you didn’t need matches to get it going, you just turned the dial, listened to the clicking, then watched the circle of blue flame flare up through the tiny holes in the burner. My favorite room was the bathroom. It had a black-and-white tile floor, a toilet that flushed with a powerful whoosh, a tub so deep you could submerge yourself completely in it, and hot water that never ran out. It didn’t bother me that the apartment was in a rough neighborhood; we’d always lived in rough neighborhoods. Puerto Rican kids hung out on the block at all hours, playing music, dancing, sitting on abandoned cars, clustering at the entrance to the elevated subway station and in front of the bodega that sold single cigarettes called loosies. I got jumped a number of times. People were always telling me that if I was robbed, I should hand over my money rather than risk being killed. But I was darned if I was going to give some stranger my hard-earned cash, and I didn’t want to become

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  The sun comes up again. So you get up and do your morning things, and one thing leads to another, and eventually, at nine, you find yourself back at the desk, staring blankly at the pages you filled yesterday. And there on page four is a paragraph with all sorts of life in it, smells and sounds and voices and colors and even a moment of dialogue that makes you say to yourself, very, very softly, “Hmmm.” You look up and stare out the window again, but this time you are drumming your fingers on the desk, and you don’t care about those first three pages; those you will throw out, those you needed to write to get to that fourth page, to get to that one long paragraph that was what you had in mind when you started, only you didn’t know that, couldn’t know that, until you got to it. And the story begins to materialize, and another thing is happening, which is that you are learning what you aren’t writing, and this is helping you to find out what you are writing. Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision, beginning with one corner of the canvas, painting what he thinks should be there, not quite pulling it off, covering it over with white paint, and trying again, each time finding out what his painting isn’t, until finally he finds out what it is. And when you do find out what one corner of your vision is, you’re off and running. And it really is like running. It always reminds me of the last lines of Rabbit, Run : “his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.” I wish I felt that kind of inspiration more often. I almost never do. All I know is that if I sit there long enough, something will happen. My students stare at me for a moment. “How do we find an agent?” they ask. I sigh. When you are ready, there are books that list agents. You can select a few names and write to them and ask if they would like to take a look at your work. Mostly they will not want to. But if you are really good, and very persistent, someone eventually will read your material and take you on. I can almost promise you this. However, in the meantime, we are going to concentrate on writing itself, on how to become a better writer, because, for one thing, becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader, and that is the real payoff. But my students don’t believe me. They want agents, and to be published.

• From Vox (1992)

  And then I felt knuckles brush against the inside of my thighs—and I knew that the first hall roller was now beginning to paint a stripe of Paper Lantern that started just at the top of my pubic hair and rolled very slowly over my clit and the rest of it, like some heavy steady piece of road equipment, and then back over my clit. And at the same time, the other hall painter had loaded his roller with the wrong paint , the Opulent Opal, and he’d turned his roller sideways and he was now pushing a horizontal stripe over my ass, at first a light stripe, and then, on the return, a harder stripe, and then he rolled down in between, and I called out, ‘No no, I’m telling you that’s the wrong paint!’ but he was very deliberately working the roller in the region of my, what shall we call it, my ‘tockhole,’ without seeming to hear me. Nontoxic paint, of course. And then I heard him put down the roller and he planted his hands high on my ass, holding my hips, and then he did an amazing thing. I felt his whole weight go on his hands, and on my back too, and he was apparently supporting himself like a gymnast, entirely on his hands, with his knees bent and his legs apart, and then a second later I felt this burning blunt nub press against my Opulent Opal tockhole, and then kind of urge itself a little ways in. I went, ‘Yew!’ and the painter in the living room turned in surprise and registered my existence for the first time. My hands were still planted on the cans of paint. And back in the hall, while the one gymnast painter was sinking himself unapologetically deep into my ass, I felt the other, the one who’d responsibly used the right kind of paint all along, now use his thumbs to hold my real … self open, my lips, and then I felt him slide slowly up my real hole. I said, ‘Vvoo!’ The living-room painter’s eyes got big, and he studied my face with this look, like, ‘What exercise tape has this lady been using?’ I’m afraid that by now I was curling my upper lip with pleasure. My expression in fact was exactly the one I would have had if I had been biting open a condom packet with my teeth, that gnashy look, but the thing was— there was no condom packet .

• From Vox (1992)

  11 facedown on my chest, entranced by those tights, and a conception, this conception of thrilling wrongness, took shape in my brain stem. I had a vision of myself jerking off while I ordered that pair of tights, specifically the vision was of, of, of. . "Of?" "Of being in the bathtub, but on the phone with the order-taker from Deliques, who's got, you know, this nice innocent voice, a mistaken but lovable overfrizzed perm, a hint of twang, bland face, freshly laundered jeans, cute socks, but probably wearing a pair of Deliques finest 'fusion panties' with a chevron of lace or something over her mound, which she's bought at the employee discount, while I'm in my bathtub, which is ridiculous since I never take baths, but I'm in my bathtub moving so carefully so she won't hear any aquatic splips or splaps and know that I've taken the portable phone into the bathroom and that I'm semi-submerged, and she says, 'Let me check to be sure we have that in stock for you, sir,' and during the pause, I arch myself up out of the water and sort of point the phone at my Werner Heisen- berg so she can see it somehow or get its vibes, and at the moment she says, 'Yes, we do have the pointelle tights in faun,' I come, in perfect silence, making a Smurf gri mace." "That's awful." "I know, but I don't know, I was there on the living- room floor. I don't often lie down there."

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  It seemed that outside the Y everyone was living on the streets and no one ever went to bed. Lou and I took the subway to the Village, emerged at Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street, and walked up Greenwich Avenue. Most of the strollers were straight couples, but here and there, flashing past like a parakeet, was a gaudy little queen, a paste clip on a shirt that might have started life as a blouse, her gait complex with extra motions, micro-motions somehow added, as though a mad scientist, after breaking walking down into its components, had had trouble reassembling the elements into a convincing continuity. “But we all walk that way,” Lou said. “We queens are so self-conscious, our little heads so drugged on just the sheer thrill of existing publicly, that we can’t even cross a room without simpering and mincing. It’s not that we start out wanting to appear effeminate. It’s that we use effeminacy after the fact as an alibi for our embarrassment, our florid but somehow ill-timed gestures, the bizarre tilt of our heads, our—” But here his lecture dissolved into a tearful laugh, for Lou loved to assail us in terms that were pushed to such an extreme that even he saw the absurdity. We were passing below the women’s prison on the corner of Eighth and Sixth, just next to the old Jefferson Market Courthouse, and two women on the street were calling up to the metal-shuttered windows. “Lorine, you cheat on me, bitch, I beat yo’ black ass, hear? I love ya’, honey, save ya’ love for mama.” Over the motor hum and the tocsin of impatient horns, these women called out to each other, their New York voices penetrating and forlorn. “Look at them, Bunny, they’re so heroic, these dykes, they don’t give a shit about all these Village Beatniks and dull-normals, they just want to wail out their love, keep that prison cunt faithful till release, ah!” and Lou pressed a broken hand to his chest as though he were a Saint Sebastian pierced by melancholy, “it’s so beautiful, this beautiful poetry of gay life.” On this hot July night the streets were thronged with people. Here a crowd circled a sidewalk artist sketching a solemn young man with waved hair and spotty skin. The sitter was posing as though his profile were about to go on the coin of the realm. He was the only one who couldn’t see how the sketch was coming along, this disappointment being patiently prepared for him. There, in the little park across from the Waverly movie theater, an impromptu game of basketball had broken out and bare sweaty black and tan torsos flashed through the dark, reflecting the lights surging up Sixth.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  That evening there was no hint of disaster at the bookshop. Morris, his lashes suitably brown, not black, was seated behind the cash register, ringing up sale after sale. Despite his shyness, Tex was circulating among the customers in a dim parody of a Southern belle. The polite young male announcer on the FM station was reading long sentences with a venom in their bite and a rattle in their tail. Then he announced he’d just finished the first part of tonight’s story, “The Beast in the Jungle.” Tex silenced him and put on a record of Callas’s mad scenes. I myself preferred the radio and the idea that other listeners liked Henry James. At one point, Tex whispered to me that the man in the corner owned several quality bookshops in New York and, though he was married, might make a nice date for me. “But if he’s married …?” Tex said, “My pet, he’s a New Yorker. They’re all bisexual, at least a man of his class. He’s here alone without his wife, you’re here, not an uncomely ephebe. If you’re subtle about it, he might let you demonstrate the difference between sucking and blowing.” A crazy Texas laugh, so at odds with his modulated tone, wildcatted up out of him till he capped it over by slapping himself and saying in mild admonishment, “Miss Me.” And he slid toward a potential customer and said professorially, “The Kierkegaard boom seems to be continuing, doesn’t it? Sartre’s influence, no doubt.” I had an image of a vast city in which people ate breakfast when it was still dark out, drove to work in patient files under raw red skies, peeled off boots in fluorescent-lit offices, at home after work practiced the Hammond organ or dozed, joked about their “spare tire” and patted it fondly—a whole gray world in which I was biding my time, stupid with longing and fear. But here, in Tex’s shop, something dangerous was glowing as bright as the waste gas flaring day and night off exhaust stacks above the factories in Gary, Indiana. I felt exhilarated by the presence of so many sophisticated adults: the woman in a black turtleneck examining Either/Or; Morris playing efficient behind the cash register and conspicuously effacing himself like a glamourpuss actress in a nun film; Tex tapping his cigarette in a Ricard ashtray, his fear of bankruptcy temporarily pushed aside; and this successful New York heterosexual who might tolerate me in his bed.

• From Vox (1992)

  And I got to this set of red books, only about maybe fifty of them, called the Silhouette Desire series, and ‘desire’ is written in this luscious sloppy longhand, in a diagonal— Desire . Alarm bells started going off in my head, and I thought of going over to Bonnie and saying, ‘Um, do you know those Silhouette Desire books? Can you tell me which title in that series is the most arousing of all of them, in your judgment?’ But I could never have done that. And it didn’t matter anyway, because hundreds of female orgasms could be inferred from the books themselves—you didn’t need to harass any particular woman, you didn’t need to invade anybody’s privacy, you could just hold any copy and think of a woman holding it open with one hand, with her thumb and little finger. It was all there in the pliability and the thumbed-ness of the book itself—it practically shouted at you, ‘I have been near a clit as it underwent two orgasms.’ ” “So did you buy one of these Silhouette Desire books?” she asked. “ Love’s Tender Gender Bender ?” “Can you hold on for just a second? I have to get it.” “I guess so, sure.” There was a pause. “It’s called Beginners Luck ” he said, “by Dixie Browning, and it’s singled out by the publisher as a quote ‘Man of the Month’ volume. Not only is it heavily thumbed, but the woman who owned it before I did spilled water or gin or something on it, so that it’s all wavy. It’s got a permanent wave. You can imagine.” “Whew.” “As I was driving home I was so stiff from owning this pre-enjoyed book that once when I was stopped at a stoplight and I saw a woman in my rearview mirror I made a very small clit-circling motion with my fingers on the roof of my car, despite the bird droppings up there—the idea that she might notice and understand what this motion meant made me feel faint with excitement—but she was expressionless. Anyway, I took the book home and read it, and you know what? It was good! Not only did it give me a partial erection on two occasions, I actually got tears in my eyes toward the end! It’s about a man and a woman in a cabin in the woods. He’s a klutzy scientist, she helps him get less klutzy and finally gets him to shave off his beard and it turns out that when he’s cleaned up he’s irresistible and despite being unschooled in the ways of love he is successful in bringing her to a fever pitch.

• From Vox (1992)

  104 started really hunting through those blankets, I was ready to call the manager over and have him go in the back. And god damn it if I didn't find this little acrylic blanket, jammed behind on a high shelf, kind of a standard green- and-blue plaid thing, no beauty, let me tell you, but with a long thick twisted fringe. She looked at it, she touched it, and she blushed, and she said, This one will do.' So I marched right over to the register and bought it. There was a cardboard insert saying, you know, SEEDYCREST FIRST QUALITY ACRYLIC BLANKET, and there was this stock picture of a woman smilingly asleep under a blanket, and as we're waiting for the woman to enter in the SKU number Emily and I both looked at this picture, and I'm telling you, nothing, anywhere, was as obscene as that picture on the blanket insert. " "How much was it?" "Ten bucks, something like that, I can't remember. On an impulse, I bought a People magazine, too. So then we went back to the car, and the great lucky thing was, I'd been able to park craftily not right in front of the discount store, but to one side, a little ways down—we were driving in my car—and I'd parked almost directly in front of this video spot. The place hadn't been too no ticeable when we'd driven in, but now that it was darker it had the flashing lights on, video video video, it was the brightest thing in the whole mall. So I opened the door for her, and she got in, and I handed her the blanket in this enormous bag, and I said, 'Hang on, I'll be right

• From Vox (1992)

  127 alternative opportunity cost of her orgasm, you feel the force of all the other perceptive things she could be think ing at that moment and is not thinking because she is coming, and they enrich it. You still there?" "I'm just trying to feel my wrist tendon," she said, "to see what it might have felt like for you. Actually, you know, there is a little muscle high up on the outside of my forearm that is moving, almost at my elbow. That's the one that's more visible in my case. Feels kind of interesting. " "Ooh, don't say that or I'll shoot." "Hah hah! I like a man who knows what he likes. Do you want to hear what I thought about when I came in the shower yesterday?" "Yes." "I'll tell you. No, I know what I'll tell you. First I'm going to tell you something else. First I'm going to tell you about how I masturbated in front of somebody. It's short." "By all means, tell me." "Shall I tell you every nasty thing that comes into my head?" "Yes." "I will then," she said. "We went to the circus. It's funny, it excites me quite a bit just to tell you that I'm going to tell you. Doing that is probably the best part. It's just like that moment when you're lumbering around on the bed to get into opposite directions to do sixty-nine, 128 that feeling of parting my legs over a man's face, before you put your hands on my back and pull me down, and my legs remember the feeling from the last time, the feeling of being locked into a preset position that is right for human bodies to be in, like putting a different lens on a camera, turning it until it clicks." "And I," he said, "would feel the mattress change its slope, first on one side of my head, and then the other, as the weight of one of your knees and then the other pressed into it, and I'd look up at you and open my mouth and I'd slide my hands over your ass with my fingers splayed and hold your ass and pull you down to my tongue." "Kha." There was a pause. "You there?" he asked. "Yes." "Tell me about the circus." "Okay. Excuse me. I'm going to have to get a fresh towel pretty soon. This guy took me to the circus." "The guy with the fancy stereo?" "Another guy," she said. "It wasn't Ringling Brothers, it was some smaller-scale South American circus, with lots of elephants, and lots of women in spangles riding the elephants. It was incredibly hot in the tent, and ev erything had this reddish tint, because the sun was bright enough outside to make it through some of the tent seams, and I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt but I was

• From Vox (1992)

  66 done that. And it didn't matter anyway, because hun dreds of female orgasms could be inferred from the books themselves—you didn't need to harass any particular woman, you didn't need to invade anybody's privacy, you could just hold any copy and think of a woman holding it open with one hand, with her thumb and little finger. It was all there in the pliability and the thumbed- ness of the book itself—it practically shouted at you, 'I have been near a clit as it underwent two orgasms.' " "So did you buy one of these Silhouette Desire books?" she asked. "Loves Tender Gender Bender?" "Can you hold on for just a second? I have to get it." "I guess so, sure." There was a pause. "It's called Beginners Luck," he said, "by Dixie Browning, and it's singled out by the publisher as a quote 'Man of the Month' volume. Not only is it heavily thumbed, but the woman who owned it before I did spilled water or gin or something on it, so that it's all wavy. It's got a permanent wave. You can imagine." "Whew." "As I was driving home I was so stiff from owning this pre-enjoyed book that once when I was stopped at a stoplight and I saw a woman in my rearview mirror I made a very small clit-circling motion with my fingers on the roof of my car, despite the bird droppings up there— the idea that she might notice and understand what this motion meant made me feel faint with excitement—but

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  The artist’s game is to move over into reality. It is to see beyond the mere “disaster” which the picture of a lost battlefield renders to the naked eye. For, since the beginning of time the picture which the world has presented to the naked human eye can hardly seem anything but a hideous battle ground of lost causes. It has been so and will be so until man ceases to regard himself as the mere seat of conflict. Until he takes up the task of becoming the “I of his I.” Reading the Face of the World—PlexusThere exists a curious book by an American anarchist, Benjamin R. Tucker, entitled INSTEAD OF A BOOK BY A MAN TOO BUSY TO WRITE ONE. The title describes my new-found situation to a T. My creative energy suddenly released, I spilled over in all directions at once. Instead of a book, the first thing I sat down to write was a prose poem about Brooklyn’s backyard. I was so in love with the idea of being a writer that I could scarcely write. The amount of physical energy I possessed was unbelievable. I wore myself out in preparation. It was impossible for me to sit down quietly and just turn on the flow; I was dancing inside. I wanted to describe the world I knew and be in it at the same time. It never occurred to me that with just two or three hours of steady work a day I could write the thickest book imaginable. It was my belief then that if a man sat down to write he should remain glued to his seat for eight or ten hours at a stretch. One ought to write and write until he dropped from exhaustion. That was how I imagined writers went about their task. If only I had known then the program which Cendrars describes in one of his books! Two hours a day, before dawn, and the rest of the day to oneself. What a wealth of books he has given the world, Cendrars! All en marge . Employing a similar procedure—two or three hours a day regularly every day of one’s life—Rémy de Gourmont had demonstrated, as Cendrars points out, that it is possible for a man to read virtually everything of value which has ever been written. But I had no order, no discipline, no set goal. I was completely at the mercy of my impulses, my whims, my desires. My frenzy to live the life of the writer was so great that I overlooked the vast reservoir of material which had accumulated during the years leading up to this moment. I felt impelled to write about the immediate, about what was happening outside my very door. Something fresh , that’s what I was after.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  A bearded sculptor in his early twenties named Ivan, who dutifully molded and cast big bronze insects, though he far preferred living the life of the artist to making art, had discovered me in the Eton barbershop. The art academy was side by side with the boys’ school, but the students and teachers of the two institutions never mixed, although a few of the poorer artists worked in the Eton kitchen. The barbershop, the kitchen, the Saturday-night movies when everyone sat on folding chairs on the basketball court of the boys’ gymnasium—those were the only places where the two populations might have spoken to each other, though they never did. I did. I spoke to Ivan. I don’t know what I said, but he invited me to his studio. He thought I was precocious for some reason; maybe he just picked up on my eagerness to gnaw off the restraints. Through him I met other painters and sculptors, including Maria. In the long winter afternoons when the skies would turn as cold and silvery as fish scales, I’d sit in the painters’ studios and smell the espresso cooking down in nickel-coated pots on hot plates and try to find in their work what they’d secreted there. At first I’d struggle to see things, guess at what was being masked by all that fudge-thick impasto, that haze of flung drops, but I discovered very quickly how “bourgeois” my interpretations—or any interpretations—seemed to the artists. I also learned to say “painter” not “artist.” I was so eager to please (an extension of the high-school urge to Be Popular) that after only a few hasty observations of how the painters responded to each other’s work, I’d mastered their technique. I, too, would sit on a high wood stool, itself piebald with spattered paint, and look and look without saying a word. That was the trick: say nothing, show nothing. A senile radio would be muttering to itself. The smell of oil paint and turpentine (for acrylics had not yet been introduced) stung my eyes and made my nose run. Windows climbed one wall, floor to ceiling, and through them I could see the silver-lined gray clouds boiling and descending like a deity about to abduct an extremely willing shepherd. I looked and looked at the painting, trying to figure out what was there to be seen. Was it a sort of chess problem to be solved, a visual riddle, or was it a cat’s cradle of tensions (I’d heard someone talking about “push” and “pull”)? Or was I being too “intellectual” (a fault, as I’d gathered)? Should I regard the painting as a spiritual X-ray, a glimpse into the painter’s unconscious ecstasy or agony? Or was it something like a football field on which conflicting teams of thoughts and feelings had skirmished and left this muddy aftermath of the action (for people spoke of “action painting”)? The painters themselves weren’t quite sure, I realize now.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Cars on MacDougal slowly waded through people like buffalo through flooded paddies. The sound of voices, of street musicians, rang off the brick walls of tenements. Above the streetlights shadowy families sat on metal fire escapes. Now we passed an ornate Italian coffee shop, flyblown mirrors hung in gilt frames dimmer than a helmet in a Rembrandt. The eagle atop the espresso machine flew imperiously through a cloud of steam. No faggots appeared to have strayed over to this side of Sixth Avenue, but once we recrossed it we were back among what Lou called the “Cha-cha queens, hairburners, and glandular cases.” A hissing trio like rattled snakes in an agitated basket were hanging out on a stoop, their lips flecked with foam. Another pair were dancing in the water of an open fire hydrant, shirts tied to expose their tummies. Lou was in a delirium: “Bunny, we’re home, you can press your ear to the pavement and hear the heartbeat,” and even though he made me feel such a prig, my heart did leap at all the possibilities this city offered to meet men. Before, I’d caught only half glimpses of queers, but like a hunter who pursues his deer deep into the night forest, at last I’d come upon a moonlit clearing filled with thousands of moving antlers, all these men. Lou had the address of a gay restaurant in the Village. When we were led by that majestic personage called the Mater D to our table in the garden, we were studied by other customers, and only after we’d sat down, ordered our oysters Rockefeller (with Pernod sauce on a bed of spinach), and sipped our daiquiris did we relax and look around. A gay bar, a cruisy toilet—that I understood, but a gay restaurant? The suggestion that gay men, like Negroes, might want to enjoy one another’s company astounded me. The city seemed like a Bring-Your-Own party that had gone on too long. Even children were still playing at midnight. A blind woman stood on a corner singing in a quavering voice the song my mother had sung to me at bedtime when I was a child: “I’ll be seeing you in apple-blossom time.” At stoplights cars shouldered each other out of the way, jockeying to gain a few inches at the starting gate. As we headed up Park Avenue in a taxi (Lou was treating), we leaned our heads back and looked up at the illuminated spires streaming past. At another stoplight a group of Puerto Rican teenagers dressed in baseball uniforms shouted at each other over the roof in raucous voices. In Chicago there’d been the Loop, but it had been virtually deserted after dark; here people seemed to live in the center city, and I expected to see lines of wash strung between skyscrapers.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us , but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, blood-curdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war-whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance! “I love everything that flows,” said the great blind Milton of our times. I was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its painful gallstones, its gravel and whatnot; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed un-fecund. I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph or unilateral. I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit towards death and dissolution. The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought. I Am Chancre, the Crab—Black SpringI am thinking of that age to come when God is born again, when men will fight and kill for God as now and for a long time to come men are going to fight for food. I am thinking of that age when work will be forgotten and books assume their true place in life, when perhaps there will be no more books, just one great big book—a Bible.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  On the one hand a staggering fleeing world, affianced to the jinglebells of the infernal gamut, on the other hand: new beings… .” Thirty-two years later and I am still saying Yes! Yes, Monsieur Antipyrine! Yes, Monsieur Tristan Bustanoby Tzara! Yes, Monsieur Max Ernst Geburt! Yes! Monsieur René Crevel, now that you are dead by suicide, yes, the world is crazy, you were right. Yes, Monsieur Blaise Cendrars, you were right to kill. Was it the day of the Armistice that you brought out your little book—J’ai tué? Yes, “keep on my lads, humanity….” Yes, Jacques Vaché, quite right—“Art ought to be something funny and a trifle boring.” Yes, my dear dead Vaché, how right you were and how funny and how boring and touching and tender and true: “It is of the essence of symbols to be symbolic.” Say it again, from the other world! Have you a megaphone up there? Have you found all the arms and legs that were blown off during the melee? Can you put them together again? Do you remember the meeting at Nantes in 1916 with André Breton? Did you celebrate the birth of hysteria together? Had he told you, Breton, that there was only the marvelous and nothing but the marvelous and that the marvelous is always marvelous—and isn’t it marvelous to hear it again, even though your ears are stopped? I want to include here, before passing on, a little portrait of you by Emile Bouvier for the benefit of my Brooklyn friends who may not have recognized me then but who will now, I am sure…. “… he was not at all crazy, and could explain his conduct when occasion required. His actions, none the less, were as disconcerting as Jarry’s worst eccentricities. For example, he was barely out of hospital when he hired himself out as a stevedore, and he thereafter passed his afternoons in unloading coal on the quays along the Loire. In the evening, on the other hand, he would make the rounds of the cafés and cinemas, dressed in the height of fashion and with many variations of costume. What was more, in time of war, he would strut forth sometimes in the uniform of a lieutenant of Hussars, sometimes in that of an English officer, of an aviator or of a surgeon. In civil life, he was quite as free and easy, thinking nothing of introducing Breton under the name of André Salmon, while he took unto himself, but quite without vanity, the most wonderful titles and adventures. He never said good morning nor good evening nor good-bye, and never took any notice of letters, except those from his mother, when he had to ask for money. He did not recognize his best friends from one day to another….” Do you recognize me, lads? Just a Brooklyn boy communicating with the red-haired albinos of the Zuni region.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  The city trash cans were overflowing with paper cups, greasy napkins, discarded newspapers. A new group of gays rushed up, emptied a can into the splintered-open doorway, doused it with lighter fluid, and lit it. A cloud of black smoke billowed up. “They’ve gone too far,” I said. A black maria came around the corner of Seventh Avenue and up Christopher the wrong way. The cops cleared the sidewalk, formed a cordon, and rushed the remaining bartenders into the van past the smoldering garbage, but the crowd booed even louder. Once the van had driven off, the cops pushed us slowly back from the bar entrance. Down the street, some of our men turned over a parked Volkswagen. The cops rushed down to it while behind them another car was overturned. Its windows shattered and fell out. Now everyone was singing the civil rights song, “We Shall Overcome.” The riot squad was called in. It marched like a Roman army behind shields down Christopher from the women’s prison, which was loud with catcalls and the clatter of metal drinking cups against steel bars. The squad, clubs flying, drove the gay men down Christopher, but everyone doubled back through Gay Street and emerged behind the squad in a chorus line, dancing the can-can. “Yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo,” they called. Lou and I stayed out all night, whooping like kids, huddling in groups to plan tomorrow’s strategy, heckling the army of cops who were closing off all of Sheridan Square as a riot zone and refusing to let cars or pedestrians pass through it. I stayed over at Lou’s. We hugged each other in bed like brothers, but we were too excited to sleep. We rushed down to buy the morning papers to see how the Stonewall Uprising had been described. “It’s really our Bastille Day,” Lou said. But we couldn’t find a single mention in the press of the turning point of our lives.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  But finally this little goddess—I really wasn’t sure what sex she was, she’d been sewn into white jeans with green thread, she had an Hermès scarf tied to her shoulder bag—anyway, she came over and I bought her a cup of coffee and now she’s moved in, I can’t believe my luck, a perfect little boy-girl all my own, he makes me dinner just like a little wife and goes to sleep listening to rock ’n’ roll from the radio under the pillow, our whole nights are afloat on a sea of rock-’n’-roll wisdom.” I had dinner several times with Lou and Misty, but Lou never participated in the conversation. He preferred to watch me interview Misty. Then he’d watch Misty respond at tedious, childlike, mendacious length—I say “watch” us because he sat at some distance from us, as though we were actors having a quick runthrough and whispering our lines. His pleasure at having such a fabulous creature in his house was increased when he gazed at Misty from a distance. When summer came, we three went to Riis Park together, taking the subway all the way to the end of the line, then switching to a bus that let us off at the big Brooklyn public beach. One section was gay, and there, late in the long hot afternoon, these cute Puerto Rican guys would start dancing to a portable radio or even a stack of the latest 45s. Beers would pass from hand to hand, a circle gathered, the late sun stared into its own reflection, the smell of seaweed blended with the cooking smells drifting over from the takeout stands along the boardwalk, the smell of franks and steamer clams. Gay boys sat and combed each other’s hair or scampered into the nearly becalmed surf as someone’s mother, a Mrs. Meyer, “spritzed” herself by flicking drops over her shoulders from diamonded old fingers. Someone had set up a white tent in the sand, not the usual boy-scout sort but a noble tent right out of a medieval movie, and three black drags kept going in and out of it to change clothes. Misty was in raptures over a Dionne Warwick look-alike. The dance gathered momentum. We were too zonked from the heat and beer and the sun’s stare to stroll over, but we lay on our sides and watched the virtuoso turns each soloist took, daring the next dancer to greater intricacies. I closed my eyes. I listened to the rhythmic clapping of the tribe. When I looked again, the red-haired Puerto Rican boy on the next towel over, wearing a swimsuit that said “Made in USA,” had finally stopped doing sit-ups and seemed to be sleeping. I felt far from the private beach of my childhood in front of our Michigan summer cottage. Now I was at once thrilled to be among so many poor people and afraid I had become one of them.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  We were passing below the women’s prison on the corner of Eighth and Sixth, just next to the old Jefferson Market Courthouse, and two women on the street were calling up to the metal-shuttered windows. “Lorine, you cheat on me, bitch, I beat yo’ black ass, hear? I love ya’, honey, save ya’ love for mama.” Over the motor hum and the tocsin of impatient horns, these women called out to each other, their New York voices penetrating and forlorn. “Look at them, Bunny, they’re so heroic, these dykes, they don’t give a shit about all these Village Beatniks and dull-normals, they just want to wail out their love, keep that prison cunt faithful till release, ah!” and Lou pressed a broken hand to his chest as though he were a Saint Sebastian pierced by melancholy, “it’s so beautiful, this beautiful poetry of gay life.” On this hot July night the streets were thronged with people. Here a crowd circled a sidewalk artist sketching a solemn young man with waved hair and spotty skin. The sitter was posing as though his profile were about to go on the coin of the realm. He was the only one who couldn’t see how the sketch was coming along, this disappointment being patiently prepared for him. There, in the little park across from the Waverly movie theater, an impromptu game of basketball had broken out and bare sweaty black and tan torsos flashed through the dark, reflecting the lights surging up Sixth. Cars on MacDougal slowly waded through people like buffalo through flooded paddies. The sound of voices, of street musicians, rang off the brick walls of tenements. Above the streetlights shadowy families sat on metal fire escapes. Now we passed an ornate Italian coffee shop, flyblown mirrors hung in gilt frames dimmer than a helmet in a Rembrandt. The eagle atop the espresso machine flew imperiously through a cloud of steam. No faggots appeared to have strayed over to this side of Sixth Avenue, but once we recrossed it we were back among what Lou called the “Cha-cha queens, hairburners, and glandular cases.” A hissing trio like rattled snakes in an agitated basket were hanging out on a stoop, their lips flecked with foam. Another pair were dancing in the water of an open fire hydrant, shirts tied to expose their tummies. Lou was in a delirium: “Bunny, we’re home, you can press your ear to the pavement and hear the heartbeat,” and even though he made me feel such a prig, my heart did leap at all the possibilities this city offered to meet men. Before, I’d caught only half glimpses of queers, but like a hunter who pursues his deer deep into the night forest, at last I’d come upon a moonlit clearing filled with thousands of moving antlers, all these men. Lou had the address of a gay restaurant in the Village.