Grief

Passages

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

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

  She asked for some water and I gave her a cup, and she leaned forward a bit to sip through the straw. I kept bawling and bawling and bawling. I couldn’t control myself. “Shh,” she said. “Don’t cry, baby. Shhhhh. Don’t cry.” “How can I not cry, Mom? You almost died.” “No, I wasn’t going to die. I wasn’t going to die. It’s okay. I wasn’t going to die.” “But I thought you were dead.” I kept bawling and bawling. “I thought I’d lost you.” “No, baby. Baby, don’t cry. Trevor. Trevor, listen. Listen to me. Listen.” “What?” I said, tears streaming down my face. “My child, you must look on the bright side.” “What? What are you talking about, ‘the bright side’? Mom, you were shot in the face. There is no bright side.” “Of course there is. Now you’re officially the best-looking person in the family.” She broke out in a huge smile and started laughing. Through my tears, I started laughing, too. I was bawling my eyes out and laughing hysterically at the same time. We sat there and she squeezed my hand and we cracked each other up the way we always did, mother and son, laughing together through the pain in an intensive-care recovery room on a bright and sunny and beautiful day. When my mother was shot, so much happened so quickly. We were only able to piece the whole story together after the fact, as we collected all the different accounts from everyone who was there. Waiting around at the hospital that day, we had so many unanswered questions, like, What happened to Isaac? Where was Isaac? We only found out after we found him and he told us. When Andrew sped off with my mom, leaving the four-year-old alone on the front lawn, Abel walked over to his youngest, picked him up, put the boy in his car, and drove away. As they drove, Isaac turned to his dad. “Dad, why did you kill Mom?” he asked, at that point assuming, as we all did, that my mom was dead. “Because I’m very unhappy,” Abel replied. “Because I’m very sad.” “Yeah, but you shouldn’t kill Mom. Where are we going now?” “I’m going to drop you off at your uncle’s house.” “And where are you going?” “I’m going to kill myself.” “But don’t kill yourself, Dad.” “No, I’m going to kill myself.” The uncle Abel was talking about was not a real uncle but a friend. He dropped Isaac off with this friend and then he drove off. He spent that day and went to everyone, relatives and friends, and said his goodbyes. He even told people what he had done. “This is what I’ve done.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 1: It is a natural law that one should repent of the evil one has done, by grieving for having done it, and by seeking a remedy for one’s grief in some way or other, and also that one should show some signs of grief, even as the Ninevites did, as we read in Jn. 3. And yet even in their case there was also something of faith which they had received through Jonas’ preaching, inasmuch as they did these things in the hope that they would receive pardon from God, according as we read (Jn. 3:9): “Who can tell if God will turn and forgive, and will turn away from His fierce anger, and we shall not perish?” But just as other matters which are of the natural law were fixed in detail by the institution of the Divine law, as we have stated in the [4725]FS, Q[91], A[4]; [4726]FS, Q[95], A[2]; FS, Q[99], so was it with Penance. Reply to Objection 2: Things which are of the natural law were determined in various ways in the old and in the New Law, in keeping with the imperfection of the old, and the perfection of the New. Wherefore Penance was fixed in a certain way in the Old Law—with regard to sorrow, that it should be in the heart rather than in external signs, according to Joel 2:13: “Rend your hearts and not your garments”; and with regard to seeking a remedy for sorrow, that they should in some way confess their sins, at least in general, to God’s ministers. Wherefore the Lord said (Lev. 5:17,18): “If anyone sin through ignorance . . . he shall offer of the flocks a ram without blemish to the priest, according to the measure and estimation of the sin, and the priest shall pray for him, because he did it ignorantly, and it shall be forgiven him”; since by the very fact of making an offering for his sin, a man, in a fashion, confessed his sin to the priest. And accordingly it is written (Prov. 28:13): “He that hideth his sins, shall not prosper: but he that shall confess, and forsake them, shall obtain mercy.” Not yet, however, was the power of the keys instituted, which is derived from Christ’s Passion, and consequently it was not yet ordained that a man should grieve for his sin, with the purpose of submitting himself by confession and satisfaction to the keys of the Church, in the hope of receiving forgiveness through the power of Christ’s Passion. Reply to Objection 3: If we note carefully what our Lord said about the necessity of Baptism (Jn. 3:3, seqq.), we shall see that this was said before His words about the necessity of Penance (Mat. 4:17); because He spoke to Nicodemus about Baptism before the imprisonment of John, of whom it is related afterwards (Jn. 3:23, 24) that he baptized, whereas His words about Penance were said after John was cast into prison.

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

  Being a high-ranking colonel, Phong was captured by the North Vietnamese authorities thirty-nine days after Saigon was taken. He was sent to a reeducation camp where he was tortured, starved, and committed to forced labor. A year later, at age forty-seven, Phong died while in detainment. His grave would not be discovered until a decade later, when his children unearthed his bones for reburial near his home province—the final gravestone reading Vuong Dang Phong. But to Earl Woods, his friend was known as none other than “Tiger Phong”—or simply Tiger, a nickname Woods had given him for his ferocity in battle. On December 30, 1975, a year before Tiger Phong’s death and across the world from Phong’s jail cell, Earl was in Cypress, California, cradling a newborn boy in his arms. The boy already had the name Eldrick but, staring into the infant’s eyes, Earl knew the boy would have to be named after his best friend, Tiger. “Someday, my old friend would see him on television . . . and say, ‘That must be Woody’s kid,’ and we’d find each other again,” Earl later said in an interview. Tiger Phong died of heart failure, most likely brought on by poor nutrition and exhaustion at the camp. But for a brief eight months in 1975 and 1976, the two most important Tigers in Earl Woods’s life were alive at once, sharing the same planet, one at the fragile end of a brutal history, the other just beginning a legacy of his own. The name “Tiger,” but also Earl himself, had become a bridge. When Earl finally heard news of Tiger Phong’s death, Tiger Woods had already won his first Masters. “Boy, does this ever hurt,” Earl said. “I’ve got that old feeling in my stomach, that combat feeling.” — I remember the day you went to your first church service. Junior’s dad was a light-skinned Dominican, his ma a black Cuban, and they worshipped at the Baptist church on Prospect Ave., where no one asked them why they rolled their r’s or where they really came from. I had already gone to the church with the Ramirezes a handful of times, when I’d sleep over on Saturday and wake up attending services in Junior’s borrowed Sunday best. That day, after being invited by Dionne, you decided to go—out of politeness but also because the church gave out nearly expired groceries donated by local supermarkets. You and I were the only yellow faces in the church. But when Dionne and Miguel introduced us to their friends, we were received with warm smiles. “Welcome to my father’s house,” people kept saying. And I remember wondering how so many people could be related, could all come from the same dad.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  After I’m living there a year or so, Liam, my mother’s gangster boyfriend, tells me that it was the bar he and his boys would frequent when in Boston. He even took my mother there a few times. When we first go inside there are still drink glasses lined up, gold lamé hanging from the walls, a list of the girls who’d be performing that night—Crystal, Amber, Cindi—taped to the dressing room door. Good Times—the sign still hanging above the gate when Ivan and I move in. Ivan takes the top floor, Richard and I take the one below, and we will find tenants for the other two. Just before we move in Richard is diagnosed HIV-positive, he shows me the test results in my truck, parked in the North End. I am devastated but ( lord help me ) I also feel self-conscious—two men crying in a pickup. By this point my brother and I have sold the house we grew up in, which is just as well, as I never spent another night there, was never able to, after my mother died. Even to this day driving into Scituate takes some effort, a willful distancing from myself. My body pushes itself away from the steering wheel as I drive, as if it wants to crawl into the backseat and curl up forever. I go to Scituate now only to see my grandfather, and before night falls I’m back in my car. We had a yard sale, paid off the mortgage, and put whatever furniture was left into storage, where it will stay for years, sixty dollars a month split between my brother and I, until he moves all he wants out and I keep paying. Both grandmothers, my mother’s mother and her father’s second wife, die within three years of my mother. Only men are left—my brother, my grandfather and me. My brother has become an artist, a painter, supporting himself with carpentry. He lives alone in Somerville in a building he and a hundred other artists bought and converted into live/work studios. The three of us begin having lunch together in the North End once a month. I have some money in the bank now but I don’t know what to do with it. “Blood money,” I call it, and it just sits there. Working the Brown Lobby I notice a young guy who starts showing up for dinner, standing just on the edge of everything, holding his plate in one hand, eating and eyeing the room. He doesn’t look like he belongs, mostly because of his shoes, very high-end. The leather’s been cut away to reveal two steel toes. A reporter, I think, doing a lousy job of being undercover. I try to draw him out. Nice shoes , I say. I just bought them today , he replies.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I smiled. “I’m gonna be forty in a couple of years, if I play my cards right.” Al nodded and turned back to the window. “We’re from the old days.” She did remember! An emotional storm cloud passed over her face. She turned to me angrily. “Leave the old days alone. Don’t bring me back, I’m dead.” I pulled away from her and then forced myself to lean forward again. “You're not dead, Al. You just got hurt real bad. You fought long and hard, but they hurt you bad. You did real good.” She turned her head toward me and let it droop. Her hand grasped for my arm, “I just couldn’t, I just ... es My voice dropped low, like a lover’s. “It’s OK now, it’s alright. You did so good that now you get to rest. It’s alright, Al.” She rested one hand on my head. The weight of her hand made me feel like a child. “Did Jackie give you that haircut?” I missed a beat, then I smiled and nodded. Al squeezed my arm. “Kid, tell her Pm sorry.” I put my hand over hers. “Jackie told me she’s not mad, Al.” She searched my face for confirmation it was true. “It’s true,” I lied, “she said don’t worry. She loves you, Al. There isn’t a day goes by she doesn’t think about you, and so do I.” Al smiled and patted my cheek. Stone Butch Blues 315 “Al,” I said, but her spirit had left like wind slamming a door shut. “Al?” She was staring out the window. Her body temperature dropped several degrees. “She’s gone,” said the Oracle. “Al,” I said, jiggling her arm. “Al, please, don’t go. Not yet, please, just give me another minute.” I hated myself for doing that. Only moments before I had sworn I would let her go back to her peace and now I was trying to drag her back again. My lip started to quiver and then my whole chin. My jaw ached. I had a second chance in life to tell her I loved her and then I blew it, just like I did as a teenager. And, like a kid, I didn’t want to leave until she reassured me that she loved me too. I leaned forward and put both my arms around her neck. “Pm sorry,” I said. “Dll leave you, Al.” The tears wouldn’t stop. “It’s just that I came all this way, across all these years, to tell you how much I love you, and now it’s too late. “T wanted to thank you. If it wasn’t for you, ’'d never have known I had a right to be me. You taught me enough to keep me alive all these years. There isn’t a day goes by that I’m not grateful for everything you gave me. You’ve meant so much in my life, Al. I always wanted to grow up in a way that would make 316 = Leslie Feinberg

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

  With only Novocain injected between your thighs, the nurses went in with a long metal instrument, and just “scraped my baby out of me, like seeds from a papaya.” It was that image, its practical mundanity, the preparation of fruit I have seen you do a thousand times, the spoon gliding along the papaya’s flesh-orange core, a slush of black seeds plopping into the steel sink, that made it unbearable. I pulled the hood of my white sweater over my head. “I saw him, Little Dog. I saw my baby, just a glimpse. A brownish blur on its way to the bin.” I reached across the table and touched the side of your arm. Just then, a Justin Timberlake song came on through the speakers, his frail falsettos woven through coffee orders, used grounds thumped against rubber trash bins. You eyed me, then past me. When your eyes came back you said, “It was in Saigon where I heard Chopin for the first time. Did you know that?” Your Vietnamese abruptly lighter, hovering. “I must’ve been six or seven. The man across the street was a concert pianist trained in Paris. He would set the Steinway in his courtyard and play it in the evenings with his gate open. And his dog, this little black dog, maybe this high, would stand up and start to dance. Its little twig legs padded the dust in circles but the man would never look at the dog, but kept his eyes closed as he played. That was his power. He didn’t care for the miracle he made with his hands. I sat there in the road and watched what I thought was magic: music turning an animal into a person. I looked at that dog, its ribs showing, dancing to French music and thought anything could happen. Anything.” You folded your hands on the table, a mixture of sadness and agitation in the gesture. “Even when the man stopped, walked over to the dog wagging its tail, and placed the treat in the dog’s open mouth, proving again that it was hunger, only hunger, not music that gave the dog its human skill, I still believed it. That anything could happen.” The rain, obedient, picked up again. I leaned back and watched it warp the windows. — Sometimes, when I’m careless, I think survival is easy: you just keep moving forward with what you have, or what’s left of what you were given, until something changes—or you realize, at last, that you can change without disappearing, that all you had to do was wait until the storm passes you over and you find that—yes—your name is still attached to a living thing.

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

  I remember my father, which is to say I am cuffing him with these little words. I am giving him to you with hands behind his back, his head ducking into the patrol car because like the table, this was how it was given to me: from mouths that never articulated the sounds inside a book. To the right of the stage were four people with their backs to everyone else. Heads bowed, they were the only ones not moving—as if enclosed in an invisible room. They stared at something on a long plastic table in front of them, their heads so low they looked decapitated. After a while, one of them, a woman with silver hair, rested her head on the shoulder of a young man to her right—and began to weep. I remember getting a letter from my father while he was in prison, the envelope wrinkled, torn at the edges. I remember holding up a piece of paper covered with lines and lines whited out where the prison guards censored his words. I remember scraping at the chalky film that lay between my father and me. Those words. Nuts and bolts to a table. A table in a room with no people. I stepped closer, and that’s when I saw on the table, impossibly still, the distinct form of a body covered in a white sheet. By now all four mourners were openly weeping while, on stage, the singer’s falsetto cut through their racked sobs. Nauseous, I searched the starless sky. A plane blinked red, then white, then blurred behind a band of clouds. I remember studying my father’s letter and seeing a scatter of tiny black dots: the periods left untouched. A vernacular of silence. I remember thinking everyone I ever loved was a single black dot on a bright page. I remember drawing a line from one dot to another with a name on each one until I ended with a family tree that looked more like a barbed-wire fence. I remember tearing it to shreds. Later, I would learn that this was a common scene on a Saigon night. City coroners, underfunded, don’t always work around the clock. When someone dies in the middle of the night, they get trapped in a municipal limbo where the corpse remains inside its death. As a response, a grassroots movement was formed as a communal salve. Neighbors, having learned of a sudden death, would, in under an hour, pool money and hire a troupe of drag performers for what was called “delaying sadness.” In Saigon, the sound of music and children playing this late in the night is a sign of death—or rather, a sign of a community attempting to heal.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  off it. I left it lying on the asphalt and ran. My lungs ached as though they might explode, but I didn’t stop running for several blocks. I finally sat down under a tree, gasping for air. 1 wondered when it would be safe to return for my bike. It was almost dusk when I went back. I stood across the street from the restaurant. I couldn’t see anyone inside except the guy behind the counter. I found my Norton in the parking lot. There wasn’t much on the bike that wasn’t smashed or twisted. They must have worked it over with a tite iron or a baseball bat. I wondered how they had shredded the thick rubber tires. I knew it was only a motorcycle, but I felt like a ghost looking down at my own mutilated body on the asphalt. I walked away from the wreckage. It was beyond salvation. It took me forever to get out to Gloria’s house. You could die before a bus comes in Buffalo. I didn’t tell her what happened, it was already awkward between us. I asked if I could use her phone. She said yes, if I wasn’t on too long, She was expecting a call. I rang up Edwin. Her voice sounded hollow and distant. Darlene had packed her things and moved out. “Oh god, Pm so sorry,” I told Ed. “Me and Theresa broke up, too.” We sat in silence. I had no wheels to get to her. “Can you pick me up, Ed?” “Darlene took the car,’ Ed said. “She took the car? It was that bad?” Ed sounded the same way I felt. Numb and detached. “No, I gave her the car to take.” Gloria caught my eye and looked at her watch. “Ed, I got no bike. Pll tell you what happened later. Pll call you, OK? Hang on. Are you alright?” ?m not sure what she answered. Gloria called her girlfriend. I could hear her crying softly in the kitchen as they talked. I lay down on the couch. I'd spent a lot of my life on other people’s couches. I hadn’t really let myself feel anything about breaking up with Theresa until that moment. I almost cried out loud, but I clamped my emotions like a tourniquet. I had no ptivacy here, no space anywhere in the world where it was safe to grieve, so I pushed it down and found the only escape route open to me: sleep. I awoke to the slam-bam sounds of cartoons. My eyes burned. They felt swollen shut. Kim and Scotty sat on the floor, leaning up against the couch I slept on. Kim glanced over her shoulder at me. “Is he awake?” Scotty asked. “Yeah,” Kim answeted, “she is.” Stone Butch Blues 169 “You're better off without her, kid,’ Grant told me. “She was a fucking communist.”

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  Senator Thomas Buddenbrook left City Hall long before the end of the session today. He turned right and so did not take the route to his house. Correct, impeccably clean, and elegant, he walked along the Breite Strasse with the somewhat hopping stride that was characteristic of him, constantly having to say hello in all directions. He wore white kid gloves and held his cane with a silver crutch under his left arm. His white tie was visible behind the thick lapels of his fur coat. But his carefully trimmed head looked bleary-eyed. Various people in passing remarked that tears suddenly welled up in his reddened eyes, and that he kept his lips closed in a very strange, gentle, and contorted way. Sometimes he gulped, as if his mouth had filled with liquid; and then you could see from the movements of the muscles on the cheeks and temples, 'What now, Buddenbrook, you're skipping the meeting? That's something new!” someone said to him at the beginning of Mühlenstrasse, whom he hadn't seen coming. It was Stephan Kistenmaker who suddenly stood before him, his friend and admirer, who made his every opinion his own on public issues. He had a rounded, graying full beard, terribly thick eyebrows and a long, porous nose. A few years ago, after earning a good deal of money, he retired from the wine business, which his brother Eduard now ran on his own. Since then he lived as a privateer; but since he was actually a little ashamed of this position, he constantly acted as if he had too much to do. "I'm wearing myself out!" he said, stroking the gray part of his head that was curled with curling tongs. "But what is man in the world for, if not to wear himself out?" For hours he stood at the stock exchange with important gestures without having to look for anything there. He held a multitude of indifferent offices. He had recently made himself director of the municipal baths. "It's a meeting, Buddenbrook," he repeated, "and you're going for a walk?" "Oh, it's you," said the senator softly, lips moving reluctantly... "I can't see for minutes. I'm in excruciating pain." "Pains? Where?" “Toothache. Yesterday. I haven't slept a wink that night... I haven't seen the doctor yet because I had business to do this morning and didn't want to miss the session. Now I couldn't stand it after all and I'm on my way to see Brecht..." "Where is it?" “Down here on the left… A molar… It's hollow, of course… It's unbearable… Farewell, Kistenmaker! You understand that I am in a hurry..." 'Yes, do you mean I don't have any? Terribly busy... Adieu! Get well soon by the way! Let him undress! Always out with it, that's the best..." Thomas Buddenbrook walked on, clenching his jaw, although that only made matters worse.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  The sound level rose again after she’d gone. I felt empty and hollow with loss. If I ached, I knew Edna must be bleeding. I waited a decent amount of time before I went back to her. “Can I buy you a drink?” I asked her. She looked startled. ““What?” She hesitated. “Yes, thank you.” We drank in silence. I felt connected to her grief. I watched the couples dancing in the smoky darkness. Out of the blue Edna looked over at me and whispered, “TI hurt.” She said it so calmly and quietly I was afraid ’d misunderstood her. But I saw the pain in her eyes so I moved my chair near hers. Edna curled up against me, softly exploring my body with hers. Holding her was such a simple joy. She sighed once and then her body shook with sobs. At first I felt embarrassed, worried what people might think. But then I gave myself to Edna, concerned only with her comfort. She trusted me enough to bring her sorrow to my arms. I kissed her hair. The scent made me lightheaded. She looked up at me. I longed to lift her chin with my hands and kiss her mouth, deeply and slowly. She saw the look in my eyes. There was no point in hiding it. “Tl be right back,” she said. Edna was in the bathroom for a long time. When she returned I offered her a cigarette and lit it for her. Edna shook her head slowly. “Just when I thought I couldn’t hurt any more, guess who walks in the door?” I exhaled smoke and watched her face. “What did she want?” I couldn’t believe Pd asked her such a personal question. Edna blinked in surprise at my directness. “She heard Jan and I broke up. She waited a month or so and came to ask me if there was a chance we could get back together.” I lightly tapped my Zippo lighter against the whiskey glass: butch Morse code. “Is there? A chance, I mean.” Edna sighed. “People have seasons, you know? Cycles. I’ve just left an eight-year marriage. Rocco’s been alone a long time.” It hurt me to think of Rocco being lonely. Stone Butch Blues 103 “T don’t think P’ve ever seen a woman like Rocco before,” I told her. I could see that Edna wasn’t quite sure what I meant and I realized she’d fight to the death to defend Rocco. “I wish she were my friend,” I said quickly, to make her understand. She smiled warmly and reached out to touch my arm. “Rocco would love you,” Edna said. I brightened. “You really think so?” Edna nodded and shook her head. “You remind me of her in many ways. You're a lot like she was when she was younger.” I wanted to ask her what she meant, but part of me was afraid to hear her answer.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Suddenly something changed in Ben. His whole body settled into a stillness that frightened me, like the smooth surface of a lake before a storm. I felt the turbulence churning beneath his surface. Ben’s hurt was presenting itself. I waited. Pain emerges at its own pace. I sat in silence, my heart pounding. Maybe this was just my imagination or the drama that Wild Turkey ushers in. But when I looked at Ben I knew I wasn’t wrong. The storm was closing in, and it was too late to run. Ben opened his wallet and pulled out two pictures. “Did I ever show you my wife and daughter?” I saw an exquisitely warm Down’s Syndrome smile on his daughter’s face. “I love that child.” His eyes filled with tears. “She’s taught me a lot.” I wanted to ask him what he’d learned but I was still emotionally barricading myself from Ben. He wanted so much to know me, and I couldn’t let him. What if I trusted him and I was wrong? Ben flipped a small old photo on the table in front of me. I studied it and laughed. “Is that your” He nodded, without smiling. I looked at the young Ben, a skinny kid with huge hands, slicked-back hair, and a beat-up leather jacket. “You were a greaser?” He nodded again. 198 Leslie Feinberg “Nice bike,” I pointed to the Harley in the photo. He smiled. I could feel the pressure building. “When I was young,” Ben said, “I thought I was a tough guy.” Funny how much men express in a few flat words. It was a butch’s way, too, of revealing heart. “Then I got busted for stealing a car. You ever been arrested, Jesse?” I took a deep breath and shook my head no. Ben nodded. “I'd been in reform school a couple of times. I was a wild kid, I broke my poor mother’s heart.” Ben tossed back another shot. The waitress caught my eye. Another round? I shook my head slightly. “I was a tough guy. You think jail’s nothing, those guards can’t break me.” I leaned toward him. I already knew. And then suddenly it was there, in his eyes, all of this shame. His eyes filled with water. I waited for the tears to drip down his cheeks, but they didn’t. I wanted to touch him, to lay my hand on his arm. But I looked around at the guys we worked with every day and I knew I couldn’t. I leaned closer to Ben. He looked me in the eyes. In silence, without words, his eyes told me what had happened to him in prison. I didn’t look away. Instead, I let him see himself in my own mirror. He saw his reflection in a womans eyes. “T never told anyone,” Ben said, as though our conversation had been out loud.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  chronicle of disaster and the absurd (1984) August. A year and a half after my mother dies I’m sitting in a change of shift meeting at the Pine Street Inn. Three in the afternoon, ten, twelve workers straggle into the empty Yellow Lobby to sit on benches in a loose circle and listen to the reading of the Main Log. In two hours these same benches will be filled with homeless men. Most of the workers sip coffee, many smoke, all seem to be only half listening. Each afternoon the 3-to-11 shift will show up in time to hear the 7-to-3 read the log. Ritualistic, those going off to those coming on. Now I know that my father lives in a room on Beacon Hill, maybe twenty blocks west, Ray keeps telling me to visit. My father’s on my radar, but most of the time I shut it off. 10:20—Two or three proselytizers from an unnamed religious group infiltrated the yard today and some of our guests were seen lined up on their knees on the sidewalk for some sort of ceremony. This is to be discouraged, as we have a captive and vulnerable audience who are easily influenced. Chronicle of the lost, chronicle of disaster and the absurd, a near-forgotten document of American history—the Main Log of the Pine Street Inn Men’s Unit. What’s written in the log is nearly always the same, variations on a few themes—someone falls, further down or further apart, a new guest arrives, someone moves on. The reading lasts anywhere from five minutes to half an hour, depending on the kind of day it’s been. There are barrings to be voted on, notes about a guest decompensating, another who’s talking about checking into detox. The men, still outside for the day, are just starting to line up in the yard for their beds. A few are inside, waiting to get into the clinic, or to talk with a counselor. One seems frozen sitting upright, his forehead glued to the table. At about 12:30 this afternoon I observed Jack Styles performing certain sexual acts on Bobo Jenkins. While there’s a time and a place for everything I don’t feel 12:30 in the afternoon is the time, nor the Brown Lobby bathroom the place. Because of Jack’s behavior and obvious disregard for P.S.I. rules and his agitation of the other guests, I’m bringing Jack up for barring. OFN Bobo for his part in the above. Everyone’s acting out continually, in one way or another, whether sitting in a corner with a coat pulled over his head or giddily lit one night after weeks of calm. A guest does have to go the extra mile in order to get noticed above the din. He has to make a significant scene in the midst of an unending scene. Jack is described as “b/m, 6’0”, brown skinned, very active libido.” The vote goes against barring him.

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

  Once, the anklebone of a blond boy underwater. There was a greenish light in that line and you saw it. The truth is we can survive our lives, but not our skin. But you know this already. — I never did heroin because I’m chicken about needles. When I declined his offer to shoot it, Trevor, tightening the cell phone charger around his arm with his teeth, nodded toward my feet. “Looks like you dropped your tampon.” Then he winked, smiled—and faded back into the dream he made of himself. Using a multimillion-dollar ad campaign, Purdue sold OxyContin to doctors as a safe, “abuse-resistant” means of managing pain. The company went on to claim that less than one percent of users became addicted, which was a lie. By 2002, prescriptions of OxyContin for noncancer pain increased nearly ten times, with total sales reaching over $3 billion. What if art was not measured by quantity but ricochets? What if art was not measured? The one good thing about national anthems is that we’re already on our feet, and therefore ready to run. The truth is one nation, under drugs, under drones. The first time I saw a man naked he seemed forever. He was my father, undressing after work. I am trying to end the memory. But the thing about forever is you can’t take it back. Let me stay here until the end, I said to the lord, and we’ll call it even. Let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it friendship, I said to myself. — I woke to the sound of wings in the room, as if a pigeon had flown through the opened window and was now thrashing against the ceiling. I switched on the lamp. As my eyes adjusted, I saw Trevor sprawled on the floor, his sneaker kicking against the dresser as he rippled under the seizure. We were in his basement. We were in a war. I held his head, foam from his lips spreading down my arm, and screamed for his old man. That night, in the hospital, he lived. It was already the second time. Horror story: hearing Trevor’s voice when I close my eyes one night four years after he died. He’s singing “This Little Light of Mine” again, the way he used to sing it—abrupt, between lulls in our conversations, his arm hanging out the window of the Chevy, tapping the beat on the faded red exterior. I lay there in the dark, mouthing the words till he appears again—young and warm and enough. The black wren this morning on my windowsill: a charred pear. That meant nothing but you have it now.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  Santa Two : The whole enterprise—the hoo-hoo, the ha-ha, the goo-goo, the ga-ga—my idea, my brainchild. Those other morons did what I told them. Dippy-do Doyle? Couldn’t find his way out of a paper bag. I made millions, kid, millions. Lived well, drank in Joe Kennedy’s hangout in Palm Beach. I walk in, bartender throws me a Johnnie Walker Black, asks, What’re you writing these days? Mostly checks, I tell him, ha ha. SANTA FOUR exits cell, again to applause, picks up the bullhorn, coughs into it, rubs sleep from his eyes. He sits on the floor, begins to play close ’n play Christmas carols quietly, experimenting, scratching a song. It begins to snow lightly . Daughter Two : Froze to death, couldn’t pry the bell from his hand. Santa One : I was a goner from the first moment, the first check. Doyle set me up. He knew about you kids, knew where you lived, threatened to kill both you and Taddy-tu-tu if I didn’t keep going along with it. Said he’d kidnap you, for chrissakes, what was I supposed to do? I only got a few thousand out of the whole gig, nothing, really. Santa Three : ( sits up suddenly, speaks to SANTA ONE ) Now, wait a minute, dryballs. There I was, in front of the Great God Giggles Garrity, the greatest judge in the U.S. judicial system…. ( to DAUGHTERS ) Write it down, dryballs, it’s classic. DAUGHTERS look at each other, confused, mouthing the word “dryballs?” SANTA FOUR stands up and attempts to hold bullhorn before SANTA THREE . Santa Three : He never smiled until the day he sentenced me. ( bullhorn to DAUGHTERS ) Turn the page, dryballs, you need a new page. DAUGHTERS slowly begin transcribing on clipboards . Santa Three : Six U.S. marshals brought me in, in shackles, penis included. ( DAUGHTERS , confused, mouth the word “penis” ) A two-million-dollar case. I was arrested going into the Breakers with a beautiful broad. ( through bullhorn to DAUGHTERS ) Hey, numbnuts, you don’t write fast enough, you’re all losing your brains. I was in love with the broad, said I’d be right back, after I spoke with the police. Dumb bunny’s probably still waiting for me, ha ha. Santa Four : Any donuts left? Lights flicker . Daughter Two : We drove at night, the city locked, subdued, steam breathing from the sewers, steam from the sides of buildings. The steam drew him to it, a cipher until he spoke, a shape, the shape of a man asleep. I am here to check his breathing, to watch the blanket rise and fall. Santa Four : ( through bullhorn ) When the mind’s free the body’s delicate. Daughter Three : The wind means something here, the snow means something. Footprints in the snow mean something. No footprints lead to this man. The snow began falling at midnight. He lay down before then. This means something.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I hurried out of the store before they could see me and raced home on my bike, just ahead of the tears. I lay on my bed for hours, until the steamy afternoon shifted to evening. Oak leaves rustled in the breeze outside my bedroom window; the streetlight projected their shadows on my wall. The whine of 242 = Leslie Feinberg cicadas rose and fell. Theresa had asked me to send her a letter someday. I wanted to write it now. I longed to deliver a bundle of sentences wrapped like a gift to her doorstep—words that would light up the night sky, words that would soothe and heal. But the words still wouldn’t come. During the long night I realized that if love had been enough, I might never have lost Theresa. But I did. I could say we came to a fork in the road. That was the truth, but it wasn’t the whole truth. I knew I had lost Theresa in little ways long before we parted. I had been at the center of her world; she had become my whole world. As my universe shrank, I needed her to be everything for me, and in return I longed to be everything she needed. Neither of us could live up to the expectations. And yet, how could it be otherwise? How could I not sink to my knees at the end of the day and ask her for sanctuary? How could she refuse, loving me the way she did? The moments she pulled my head onto her lap and stroked my face were all I knew of refuge and acceptance. For her, my admission of need was what she’d asked of me in infinite ways. I don’t know where else I could have gone for safety in an unsafe world. And I don’t think she could have possibly sustained her love for me if I had remained a fortress. Maybe the problem was that I’d begun to believe her love could protect me, begun to expect it, to demand it. Maybe she believed if she just tried harder she could keep me safe. When she wiped the blood from my face did it mock her power? Would it be any different if we were in each other’s arms again? Someday I would tell her the little things I was beginning to understand. But for now, I could only write seven lines for her—a short poem squeezed from the clenched heart of a he-she: Especially in the cool night when leafy boughs make patterns on the walls and consciousness gently ebbs making way for sleep to lap my shores in that long moment of no control coals of remembering glow softly lending the darkness a different hue.

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

  I’m on the train from New York City. In the window my face won’t let me go, it hovers above windswept towns as the Amtrak slashes past lots stacked with shelled cars and farm tractors shot through with rust, backyards and their repeating piles of rotted firewood, the oily mounds gone mushy, pushed through the crisscross of chain-link fences, then hardened in place. Past warehouse after warehouse graffitied, then painted white, then graffitied again, the windows smashed out for so long glass no longer litters the ground below, windows you can look through, and glimpse, beyond the empty dark inside, the sky, where a wall used to be. And there, just beyond Bridgeport, sits the one boarded house in the middle of a parking lot the size of two footballs fields, the yellow lines running right up to the battered porch. The train barrels past them all, these towns I have come to know only by what leaves them, myself included. The light on the Connecticut River is the brightest thing in the afternoon’s overcast. I’m on this train ’cause I’m going back to Hartford. I take out my phone. And a barrage of texts floods the screen, just like I expected. u hear abt trev? check fb it’s about Trevor pick up fuck this si horrifc call me if u want I just saw. damn i’ll call ashley to make sure just lmk ur good the wakes on sunday its trev this time? I knew it For no reason, I text him: Trevor I’m sorry come back, then turn off the phone, terrified he’d answer. — It’s already night by the time I get off at Hartford’s Union Station. I stand in the greasy parking lot as people hurry through the drizzle into waiting taxis. It’s been five years and three months since Trevor and I first met, since the barn, the Patriots game through radio static, the army helmet on the dusty floor. I wait alone under an awning for the bus that will take me across the river, to the town that holds everything Trevor except Trevor himself. I did not tell anyone I was coming. I was in the Italian American Lit class at a city college in Brooklyn when I saw, on my phone, a Facebook update from Trevor’s account, posted by his old man. Trevor had passed away the night before. I’m broken in two, the message said. In two, it was the only thought I could keep, sitting in my seat, how losing a person could make more of us, the living, make us two. I picked up my bag and left the class. The professor, discussing a passage from Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, stopped, looked at me, waiting for an explanation. When I gave none she continued, her voice trailing behind me as I fled the building. I walked all the way uptown, along the East Side, following the 6 train up to Grand Central.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  chet’s last call Most have been in one war or another—Vietnam, mostly—for some it’s true and some just believe it’s true. Many have been married, many have been in prison. One man speaks through a hole in his throat. Several are blind, many deaf or near deaf. The junkies have holes in their arms that won’t heal. A cotton wick needs to be inserted daily, to drain the pus, and most days they forget to have it done. The epileptics need their meds or they seize—if they drink on their meds they seize worse. Men come through the door with limps and canes, with walkers, crutches, in wheelchairs, and crawling. Some are carried in, draped between two friends, feet dragging behind. One has a glass eye he keeps losing. One has FUCK YOU tattooed on the inside of his lower lip. A few have tears tattooed on their cheeks, which means they’ve killed someone. Some have scars from the corners of their mouths to their ears, which means they squealed. Many fingers are gone, or half gone, to heavy machinery or knife fights. Some earlobes have been nibbled off by rats. One guy was set on fire—now the burn scars rise up his neck like flames. A few of the old guys have hernias—their stomachs have fallen into their testicles, which now hang enormously between their legs. Kenny has had the same cough for five years, so he cannot sleep upstairs. At one point David’s teeth were giving him trouble, so he got a book on dentistry from the library and began to learn on himself. He opens his mouth and shows us, how he’d pulled out the infected tooth with pliers, super-glued tiny nails in its place. That first summer twenty or thirty guys could be sprawled out on the benches and floor of the Brown Lobby. We put a cap on the number we will allow in after nine, send the rest back into the night. As the nights get colder more men show up, and a temperature is agreed upon, maybe forty-five degrees, if it gets below that we won’t turn anyone away. The lobbies will be open and the men can wander in anytime. Still, some freeze to death outside, those that can’t make it back, those that forget there’s someplace to go. As fall becomes winter the numbers sleeping in each lobby increase, until by January there are a hundred, a hundred and fifty men sprawled out. Clusterfucked, now there’s nowhere to even put your foot—guys stake out corners, tabletops, benches, any square of open floor, and still more come, without anywhere to fall but on top of someone else, who yell and kick and punch the intruder off. Some end up playing cards and smoking beneath the gloom of an exit sign or in the shaft of light coming from the open door of the piss-soaked bathroom. Some wrap their bodies around their possessions and feign sleep.

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

  In that street, beside the lifeless person who was somehow more animated in stillness than the living, the perpetual stench of sewage and runoff that lined the gutters, my vision blurred, the colors pooled under my lids. Passersby offered sympathetic nods, thinking I was part of the family. As I rubbed my face, a middle-aged man gripped my neck, the way Vietnamese fathers or uncles often do when trying to pour their strength into you. “You’ll see her again. Hey, hey,” his voice croaked and stung with alcohol, “you gonna see her.” He slapped the back of my neck. “Don’t cry. Don’t cry.” — This man. This white man. This Paul who swings open the wooden garden gate, the metal latch clanking behind him, is not my grandfather by blood—but by action. Why did he volunteer in Vietnam when so many boys were heading to Canada to dodge the draft? I know he never told you—because he would have had to explain his abstract and implacable love of the trumpet in a language he would falter in. How he wanted, as he claimed, to be “a white Miles Davis” from the backwoods and cornfields of rural Virginia. How the trumpet’s fat notes reverberated through the two-story farmhouse of his boyhood. The one with its doors torn clean off by a father who raged through the rooms terrorizing his family. The father whose only connection to Paul was metal: the shell lodged in his old man’s brain from the day he stormed Omaha beach; the brass Paul lifted to his mouth to make music. I remember the table. How I tried to give it back to you. How you held me in your arms and brushed my hair, saying, “There, there. It’s okay. It’s okay.” But this is a lie. It went more like this: I gave you the table, Ma—which is to say I handed you my rainbow cow, pulled out of the wastebasket when Mr. Zappadia wasn’t looking. How the colors moved and crinkled in your hands. How I tried to tell you but did not have the language you would understand. Do you understand? I was a gaping wound in the middle of America and you were inside me asking, Where are we? Where are we, baby? I remember looking at you for a long time and, because I was six, I thought I could simply transmit my thoughts into your head if I stared hard enough. I remember crying in rage. How you had no idea. How you put your hand underneath my shirt and scratched my back anyways. I remember sleeping like that, calmed—my crushed cow expanding on the nightstand like a slow-motion color bomb. Paul played music to get away—and when his old man tore up his application for music school, Paul got even further, all the way to the enlistment office, and found himself, at nineteen, in South East Asia.

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

  I stand, the laptop held out in front of me, and point Paul’s face to Lan’s grave, which is embossed with a photo of her when she was twenty-eight, roughly the age when they first met. I wait from behind the screen as this American veteran Skypes with his estranged Vietnamese ex-wife, just buried. At one point, I think the signal had cut out, but then I hear Paul blowing his nose, his sentences amputated, struggling through his goodbyes. He’s sorry, he says to the smiling face on the grave. Sorry that he went back to Virginia in ’71 after he received notice that his mother was ill. How it was all a ploy to get him home, how his mother faked her tuberculosis until weeks turned to months, until the war began to close and Nixon stopped deploying troops and Americans started pulling out. How all the letters Lan sent were intercepted by Paul’s brother. How it wasn’t until one day, months before Saigon fell, a soldier, just home, knocked on his door and handed him a note from Lan. How Lan and their daughters had to leave the capital after the fall. How they’ll write again. He said sorry that it took so long. That by the time the Salvation Army called him to let him know there was a woman with a marriage certificate with his name on it looking for him in a Philippine refugee camp, it was already 1990. He had, by then, been married to another woman for over eight years. He says all this in a flood of stuttered Vietnamese—which he picked up during his tour and kept at through their marriage—until his words are barely coherent under his heaving. A few children from the village had gathered at the edge of the graves, their curious and perplexed stares hover on the periphery. I must look strange to them, holding the pixelated head of a white man in front of a row of tombs. As I look at Paul’s face on the screen, this soft-spoken man, this stranger turned grandfather turned family, I realize how little I know of us, of my country, any country. Standing by the dirt road, not unlike the road Lan had once stood on nearly forty years earlier, an M-16 pointed at her nose as she held you, I wait until my grandpa’s voice, this retired tutor, vegan, and marijuana grower, this lover of maps and Camus, finishes his last words to his first love, then close the laptop. —

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  The storm has passed now. There is a pink glow of light on the horizon outside my window. I am remembering the nights I fucked you deep and slow until the sky was just this color. I cant think about you anymore, the pain is swallowing me up. | have to put your memory away, like a precious sepia photograph. There are still so many things I want to tell you, to share with you. Since I cant mail you this letter, IM send it to a place where they keep women’s memories safe. Maybe someday, passing through this big city, you will stop and read it. Maybe you wont. Good night, my love. I DIDN’T WANT TO BE different. I longed to be everything grownups wanted, so they would love me. I followed all their rules, tried my best to please. But there was something about me that made them knit their eyebrows and frown. No one ever offered a name for what was wrong with me. That’s what made me afraid it was really bad. I only came to recognize its melody through this constant refrain: “Is that a boy or a girl?” I was one more bad card life had dealt my parents. They were already bitterly disappointed people. My father had grown up determined he wasm't going to be stuck in a factory like his old man; my mother had no intention of being trapped in a marriage. When they met, they dreamed they were going on an exciting adventure together. When they awoke, my father was working in a factory and my mother had become a housewife. When my mother discovered she was pregnant with me, she told my dad she didn’t want to be tied down with a kid. My father insisted she’d be happy once she had the baby. Nature would see to that. My mother had me to prove him wrong. My patents were enraged that life had cheated them. They were furious that marriage blocked their last opportunity to escape. Then I came along and I was different. Now they were furious with me. I could hear it in the way they retold the story of my birth. Rain and wind had lashed the desert while my mother was in labor. That’s why she gave birth to me at home. The storm was too violent to be forded. My father was at work, and we had no phone. My mother said she wept so loudly in fear when she realized I was on the way that the Dineh grandmother from across the hall knocked on the door to see what was wrong, and then realizing my birth was imminent, brought three more women to help. The Dineh women sang as I was born. That’s what my mother told me. They washed me, fanned smoke across my tiny body, and offered me to my mother.