Loneliness

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 City of Night (1963)

  It felt good to be sitting here with this girl, to be seen with her by some of the men I had scored from. Abruptly, as if suddenly bugged by the park, she asked me to come up to her place. “I live with three guys,” she said, “but they’re always out here in the afternoon.” The door to the apartment is open. “It’s always unlocked,” she said. “If you ever need a pad, come up—we got lots of room.” The cramped apartment is completely disheveled—unwashed dishes piled in the sink, frozen-food trays and beer cans discarded on the floor—her clothes and those of the others strewn all over the rooms. There were two beds in the one bedroom, a couch, and a mattress on the floor. Again I catch her looking at me in that strange way—and she said—just like this—just as abruptly and unexpectedly at this: “I bet you dig Bartok.” I told her yes. “Me, too, man,” she said. “See, I knew it.... Thats what I meant when I said something about you bugged me. I mean, you look like you belong but—...Why do you hang around this scene?” she asked me. “I dont know,” I answered her. “I dont really know why I hang around either,” she said. From under one bed, she pulls out a cheap record-player, and there was a record already on the turntable. “It’s the only one Ive got,” she said. It begins to play: Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta . Scratchily on the cheap machine—but still beautifully—it plays the haunting, haunted music. I lay beside her on the rumpled bed, and I hold her hand—which is very cold—while the music played; and she pressed herself suddenly against me with a huge lost franticness. “Man,” she said, “I know the scene: Youve got to pretend you dont give a damn and swing along with those that really dont—or you go under....” Startlingly, as I rolled over on her, she gets up suddenly. Suddenly she looks mean. “Why dont you get out of that scene?” she snaps. “All of you keep telling yourselves youre straight—and you make it with chicks to prove it—and when you make it with other guys, you say it’s only for the bread—and besides, with them, you dont do anything back in bed—if you dont!... Sure, maybe it’s true—Now!” She turns the record off. “Why dont you split the scene, man— if you really want to!” she said. Then in a tone that was as much bitter as mean, she challenged: “I bet youve never even clipped a wallet from those guys you go with.” I remember the almost-time.... “No.” “Get out of it—now!” she said. “Get a job!” “I’ve worked more than you think,” I said, strangely defensive. “But you always come back,” she thrust at me quickly. “Yes.” “Then why?” “I dont know,” I said again. She returns to the bed.

• From City of Night (1963)

  We went to a hotel nearby, much better than the ones on Main Street. Coldly, we went up the elevator, into his room... Outside, he hadnt appeared as drunk as he seems now, and I wonder if somehow it’s necessary that he be drunk—and if not really that drunk, that he pretend to be. He removes only his coat, places it carefully inside-out on a chair, his wallet showing half-out from the pocket In bed, when he touched me, it was all quick, frantic.... Then he lay back as if in drunken sleep. Instantly—doing what I had come up to do—I reached for his wallet. I removed all the money. I left the wallet, open, on the chair. And I walked out feeling strangely triumphant for having just clipped the man with whom, that first afternoon in Los Angeles, I had failed the world I had searched. LANCE: The Ghost of Esmeralda Drake III IN THAT SHADOWED WORLD OF DIM bars characterized by nervous gestures, furtive looks, masked Loneliness—the World of the Gay Bars—over which the image of an intensely adoring Mother hovers nebulously like a figure created by the clouds of smoke—in that world, Lance O’Hara had sparkled in its cloudy heaven: A Legend. True—although he had been a part of the world of glittering moviedreams—Lance had never Made It Big, and you will not remember his name among the enchanted moviecredits. He had been a chorus boy at first, later a dancing partner for the Goddesses of the Screen. Nevertheless, in his world—That World—Lance had been a Star: “the greatest beauty in Hollywood,” the most Desired and sought after.... From the beginning, Lance O’Hara (secure in his own desirability, which was recognized and whispered about, longed for enviously or wantingly even among The Stars) had valiantly dropped the mask: He desired young males like himself, and he admitted it openly. About him, in the fringes of that world which Lance had ruled unquestionably—and sometimes mercilessly with the disdain of those who know that beauty rules anarchy—the “extras” had existed to carry his legend into the bars—because that world of bars, extending like an underground from New York to Hollywood with fugitive stops in other cities, is a world of whisperers deliciously recording each conquest, each new skirmish of its stars—but, also... a chorus waiting eagerly in the wings to enter and announce a new Downfall. And it waits to be alerted of an imminent Fall.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Soon it would turn bitter cold, he warned me (and, already, the wind raked the streets savagely), and the hustling would become more difficult; the competition on the streets keener. “You can shack up with someone permanent, though,” he told me, looking at me curiously as if he were trying to find out something about me; “but me,” he added hurriedly, “I dont dig that scene—I guess Im too Restless.” He made it, instead, from place to place, week to week, night to night. Or, he told me, he’d stay in one of the all-night movies. Sometimes he would rent a room off Seventh Avenue where they knew him. “And if you aint got a pad any time, spote,” he said, “you can pad there too.” Then he changed the subject quickly. “I dig feeling Free all the time,” he said suddenly, stretching his arms. And I could understand those feelings. Alone, I, too, felt that Enormous freedom. Yet... there was always a persistent sensation of guilt: a strong compulsion to spend immediately whatever money I had scored. I still lived in that building on 34th Street, its mirrored lobby a ghost of its former elegance. I paid $8.50 a week for the room. Opposite my window, in another wing of the same building, lived an old man who coughed all night. Sometimes he kept me awake. Sometimes it was the old, old woman who staggered up and down the hallway whistling, checking to see that no one had left the water running in the bathrooms or the gas burning in the community kitchen. At times it was Gene de Lancey—the woman with the demented eyes I had met the first day in the hallway—who kept me up. Once she had been Beautiful—she had sighingly shown me pictures of herself, then! —now she was sadly faded, and her eyes burned with the knowledge. She seldom went out, although I did see her on the street one late afternoon, shielding her face with her hand. She’d knock on my door sometimes early in the morning, often as I had just walked in: I would wonder if she listened for me to come in. I would open the door, and shes standing there in a Japanese kimono. “Lambie-pie,” she’d say in a childish whimper, “I just couldnt sleep, I just gotta have a cigarette and talk—Steve’s asleep—” That was her present husband. “—and I knew you wouldnt mind, sweetie.” She would sit and talk into the morning, with such passion, such lonesomeness, that I couldnt bring myself to ask her to leave. She would tell me about how everyone she had ever loved had left her: her mother, dead—her father, constantly sending her to boarding schools as a girl—her two previous husbands, Gone—her son, disappeared. “Theres no love in this harsh world,” she lamented. “Everybody’s hunting for Something—but what?”

• From City of Night (1963)

  But I was waiting for an answer to a request I had made of Grove; and it arrived, a further advance on royalties so I could make the down-payment on a house for my mother. I flew to New York to meet another major figure in my life, the man who had invited me to Tanglewood; and I spent the following months with him in a fourteenth-storey apartment overlooking the Hudson River (an enormous eagle appeared on the balcony one day and peered in through a glass wall), then in Tanglewood; and then we went to Puerto Rico, the Caribbean Islands. On a beach I read in a New York gossip column that I was a guest of Mr. So-and-so on Fire Island, a place I have never visited. That was the first I would learn of several men claiming to be me, impostures made possible by the fact that I had decided not to promote this book, to retain my private life; only my publishers knew I was in New York, in Riverdale. In late September I returned to El Paso, to another of the most cherished memories of all my life, of my mother joyfully showing me the house I had bought for her, her new furnishings. She had a dinner-reception for me, with my brothers and sisters and my special great-aunt. Strangers appeared at my house, creating ruses to be let in. One youngwoman came to the door, claiming to be the “Barbara” of this book. In school, in the army, and on the streets, I had been what is called a loner—very much so. These incidents increased my isolation. But it seemed appropriate to me, this period of “austerity”: I did not want my life to change radically while the lives of the people I had written about remained the same. In El Paso I began the transition from “youngman” to “man.” I created my own gym in my mother’s new home, and I began working out fiercely with weights. Some excellent reviews began appearing, and eventually the book would be translated into about a dozen languages. Letters arrived daily—moving letters, from men, women, young ones, older ones, homosexual, heterosexual. I answered every one. When I went out, it was usually to drive into the Texas desert. I had only two or three friends. With the exception of brief trips to Los Angeles and one to New York, I remained in El Paso in relative isolation until my mother died and I left the city perhaps forever.

• From City of Night (1963)

  In the morning, that man, hes comin on hes sorry—sorry for what happened, says it’s the first time an everything—an hes sorry. I didnt know what he was talking about. But he keeps going on until I knowed what was buggin him: he’d swung on my joint—an, man, he didn know I been asleep all the time.... So he lays some bread on me—an I come on to L.A. an land in this here park.... Sergeant Morgan, hes the one that tole me what goes on. He took me downstairs, warns me about all the hustling goin on an everything. An while hes talking an Im saying to him: ‘Nope, not for me’—Im figurin: Hell, I don know how to do nothin—an I ain never gonna have that Horse—so, hell, I’ll stick aroun.... An here I am,” he said. He stretches his legs—owning the railing: his home, this park.... Now it was beginning to get cooler. In Los Angeles, night comes like a blessing, even after the warmest afternoons. Soon, long shadows will protect the exiles, shelter them soothingly before the concealing night. And as it becomes later and the loneliness and the determination become hungrier, the frenziedness will increase. And even now, it’s beginning. Ollie, Holy Moses, preaching, shouting.... Shrieks of pain, muted pleas to God, going up unheeded or unheard.... The Negro woman has returned: Shes “Comin, Lawd!” again, as if He really gave a damn.... Jenny Lu strums her guitar to emphasize her scarlet past: “Sin!” (Plunk!) “The flesh!” (Plunk!) “Fornication!” (Plunk! Plunk!!) ... Two obvious scores stare at the youngmen. They are of that calculating breed who look at you like merchandise: “How big is it?... How long can I have it?... Youre asking too much—I’ll give you—...” Youngmen along the ledges.... Lonesomeness is alive.... The fixed eyes.... The youngman in the army shirt is still here, still waiting.... An old harpy mutters to no one remembered fragments from the jungle of her spent mind.... And the ghostpale woman is whispering to a ratty-looking teenage boy who smiles incredulously at what shes saying.... A couple of queens, in anticipation of the night, have now bravely stationed themselves along the walk. Catching sight of a cop coming around the corner, they shift their stances quickly to those as masculine as they can muster—but still a parody. But the cop stops short of them, talks gruffly to the youngman in the army shirt... Chuck has been staring steadily into the park which is seething with all the live lonesomeness.... “An here I am,” he echoes himself. “And afterwards?”

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Likewise, evidence suggests that positivity resonance raises your oxytocin levels. And under the influence of oxytocin, you grow calmer, more attuned to others, friendlier, and more open. Here, too, your skills for forging connections sharpen, which increases your ability to cultivate positivity resonance. Through oxytocin as well then, love begets love. Recall, too, that positive connections with others create neural coupling, or synchronous brain activity between people. With repetition, positivity resonance also produces structural changes in the brain, for instance, rendering the threat-detecting amygdala more sensitive to the calming influence of oxytocin. While much of the work on neuroplasticity—the brain’s capacity to change with experience—comes from research on nonhuman animals, tantalizing evidence has also recently emerged from studies of humans. Becoming a parent, for instance, not only opens the door for parent-infant positivity resonance but also appears to usher in structural changes in brain regions that facilitate positivity resonance. This research shows how love reroutes the neural wiring of your brain, making it more likely that you’ll have healthy habits and healthy social bonds in the future. Through brain plasticity, too, then, love begets love. Plasticity, or openness to change, characterizes your body’s cells as well. New cells are born within you all the time. Even now, as you take time to read this book, new cells are coming online within you, taking their predetermined place within the massive orchestra of communication and mutual influence that you call your body. Yet not everything about the birth of your new cells is scripted in advance by your DNA. Some aspects are open to contextual influences signaled by the changing biochemicals that course through you. If you feel lonely and disconnected from others, for instance, your circulating levels of the stress hormone cortisol will rise. Your cortisol levels, in turn, signal your immune system to alter the way your genes are expressed in your next-generation white blood cells, specifically making them less sensitive to cortisol. When this happens, studies show, your inflammatory response becomes more chronic, less responsive to cues that a crises situation has subsided. This is how, over time, chronic feelings of loneliness can weaken people’s immune systems and open the door to inflammation-based chronic illnesses, like cardiovascular disease and arthritis. The data go further to suggest that feeling isolated or unconnected to others does more bodily damage than actual isolation, suggesting that painful emotions drive the bodily systems that in turn steer you toward dire health outcomes. By tracking how your emotions—and the biochemical changes they trigger—alter gene expression within your immune system, the tools of molecular biology now show how a lack of love compromises your immunity and your health.

• From Educated (2018)

  Mother was marketing her products as a spiritual alternative to Obamacare, and she was selling product as fast as she could make it, even with dozens of employees. God had to be behind such a wondrous success, Grandpa said. My parents must have been called by the Lord to do what they have done, to be great healers, to bring souls to God. I smiled and stood to go. He was the same gentle old man I remembered, but I was overwhelmed by the distance between us. I hugged him at the door, and gave him a long look. He was eighty-seven. I doubted whether, in the years he had left, I would be able to prove to him that I was not what my father said I was, that I was not a wicked thing. —TYLER AND STEFANIE LIVED a hundred miles north of Buck’s Peak, in Idaho Falls. It was there I planned to go next, but before leaving the valley, I wrote my mother. It was a short message. I said I was nearby and wanted her to meet me in town. I wasn’t ready to see Dad, I said, but it had been years since I’d seen her face. Would she come? I waited for her reply in the parking lot at Stokes. I didn’t wait long. It pains me that you think it is acceptable to ask this. A wife does not go where her husband is not welcome. I will not be party to such blatant disrespect. * The message was long and reading it made me tired, as if I’d run a great distance. The bulk of it was a lecture on loyalty: that families forgive, and that if I could not forgive mine, I would regret it for the rest of my life. The past, she wrote, whatever it was, ought to be shoveled fifty feet under and left to rot in the earth . Mother said I was welcome to come to the house, that she prayed for the day when I would run through the back door, shouting, “I’m home!” I wanted to answer her prayer—I was barely more than ten miles from the mountain—but I knew what unspoken pact I would be making as I walked through that door. I could have my mother’s love, but there were terms, the same terms they had offered me three years before: that I trade my reality for theirs, that I take my own understanding and bury it, leave it to rot in the earth. Mother’s message amounted to an ultimatum: I could see her and my father, or I would never see her again. She has never recanted. —THE PARKING LOT HAD filled while I was reading. I let her words settle, then started the engine and pulled onto Main Street. At the intersection I turned west, toward the mountain. Before I left the valley, I would set eyes on my home.

• From Educated (2018)

  She had even enlisted the help of our cousin Missy, who had come up from Salt Lake City to tutor her. Missy had worked with Audrey for an entire summer, at the end of which she’d declared that Audrey’s education hovered somewhere between the fourth- and fifth-grade levels, and that a GED was out of the question. I chewed my lip and stared at her daughter, who had brought me a drawing, wondering what education she could hope to receive from a mother who had none herself. We made breakfast for the children, then played with them in the snow. We baked, we watched crime dramas and designed beaded bracelets. It was as if I had stepped through a mirror and was living a day in the life I might have had, if I’d stayed on the mountain. But I hadn’t stayed. My life had diverged from my sister’s, and it felt as though there was no common ground between us. The hours passed; it was late afternoon; and still she felt distant from me, still she refused to meet my gaze. I had brought a small porcelain tea set for her children, and when they began to quarrel over the teapot, I gathered up the pieces. The oldest girl reminded me that she was five now, which she said was too old to have a toy taken away. “If you act like a child,” I said, “I’ll treat you like one.” I don’t know why I said it; I suppose Shawn was on my mind. I regretted the words even as they left my lips, hated myself for saying them. I turned to pass the tea set to my sister, so she could administer justice however she saw fit, but when I saw her expression I nearly dropped it. Her mouth hung open in a perfect circle. “Shawn used to say that,” she said, fixing her eyes on mine. That moment would stay with me. I would remember it the next day, when I boarded a plane in Salt Lake City, and it would still be on my mind when I landed in London. It was the shock of it that I couldn’t shake. Somehow, it had never occurred to me that my sister might have lived my life before I did. —THAT TERM, I PRESENTED myself to the university like resin to a sculptor. I believed I could be remade, my mind recast. I forced myself to befriend other students, clumsily introducing myself again and again until I had a small circle of friends. Then I set out to obliterate the barriers that separated me from them. I tasted red wine for the first time, and my new friends laughed at my pinched face. I discarded my high-necked blouses and began to wear more fashionable cuts—fitted, often sleeveless, with less restrictive necklines. In photos from this period I’m struck by the symmetry: I look like everyone else. In April I began to do well.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Moments passed like that. And now his hand closes over mine, tightly. And that was all that happened. The man in the other wing of the building, on the other side of my window, began to cough very early, and I got up hurriedly and dressed. “I have to go out,” I told Pete. “Me, too,” he said. “I have to see someone.” We avoided looking at each other. “I’ll see you around The Street,” he said at the door. “Man,” he says—but his voice was forced, as mine was, “I got a real tough score lined up today—hes worth Twenty.” “Later,” I said. “Later—spote,” he said. I saw him again, many times—in the movie theaters, in Bryant Park, on Times Square. We would say hello to each other, stop, talk casually: He would exaggerate his scores, I would exaggerate mine. But we were never together for long any more. “I have to score,” one of us would say, and we’d split. Soon we wouldnt stop to talk to each other when we met. We would say hello, rush on.... And then one day, one stifling summer day, I saw him bouncing along the street in my direction. I turned sharply, pretended to be looking at some movie posters; and glancing back once, briefly, I notice that he—for the same reason I had turned away, to avoid meeting—had crossed to the other side of the street. CITY OF NIGHT THE WORLD OF TIMES SQUARE was a world which I was certain I had sought out willingly—not a world which had summoned me. And because I believed that, its lure, for me, was much more powerful. I flung myself into it Summer had come angrily into New York with the impact of a panting animal. Relentless hot nights follow scorching afternoons. Trains grinding along the purgatorial subway tunnels (compressing the heat ferociously, while at times, on the lurching cars, a crew of Negro urchins dance appropriately to the jungle-rhythmed bongoes) expel the crowds—From All Points—at the Times Square stop.... And the streets are jammed with sweating faces. The chilled hustling of winter now becomes the easy hustling of summer. At the beginning of the warm days, the corps of newyork cops feels the impending surge of street-activity, and for a few days the newspapers are full of reports of raids: UNDESIRABLES NABBED. The cops scour Times Square. But as the summerdays proceed in sweltering intensity, the cops relent, as if themselves bogged down by the heat. Then they merely walk up and down the streets telling you to move on, move on. Inevitably youre back in the same spot.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Yes.’ Because this story struck me as extraordinary, and it still does. Once upon a time there was a man in a spacesuit in a secret reconnaissance plane reading The Once and Future King, that great historical epic, that comic, tragic, romantic retelling of the Arthurian legend that tussles with questions of war and aggression, and might, and right, and the matter of what a nation is or might be. White is not a fashionable writer. When I read English at university his name wasn’t mentioned at all. But once upon a time White was very famous indeed. In 1938 he published a children’s book about the boyhood of King Arthur called The Sword in the Stone and it made his name and his fortune. Disney snapped up the rights and turned it into an animated cartoon. White went on to write The Once and Future King, which covered the rest of the Arthurian story, and that in turn inspired the stage-musical and film Camelot. White’s reworking of Arthurian legend was hugely influential: when you hear Kennedy’s White House described as Camelot, that is White – Jackie Kennedy quoted lines from the musical after her husband’s assassination. When you think of the wizard Merlin wearing a tall, peaked hat embroidered with stars, that is White too. And when I think of the U2 pilot up there reading a book about King Arthur, a book that had been wrenched strangely into a fairytale about American political life, I can’t help but think of a line written by the poet Marianne Moore: The cure for loneliness is solitude. And the solitude of the pilot in the spy-plane, seeing everything, touching nothing, reading The Once and Future King fifty thousand feet above the clouds – that makes my heart break, just a little, because of how lonely that is, and because of some things that have happened to me, and because T. H. White was one of the loneliest men alive.

• From City of Night (1963)

  The parades.... In one moment of sharing (as on that night, sitting with Sylvia on the steps of the courtyard of her bar: with Jocko and Kathy), the hint of a miracle can occur. But even vague miracles fade, turn inside out. Momentarily, the knowledge of Sylvia’s pain, when it had become a spoken thing, had fused with our own knowledge of ourselves, and from that knowledge of guilt, in that courtyard, we had attempted mutually to vindicate each other. But a kind of closeness that joins people too suddenly can be a fleeting thing. Accumulated for years, finally released by liquor, confessions flow out like a flood-swollen river. Then, calmed, the waters seek to return to their source, to retreat; but the memory of the turmoil, of the flooding, remains, scarring the land it washed. And so it was now with Sylvia. For a whole day she had stayed away from The Rocking Times. When she returned, it with again the Sylvia I had first known: sitting at the bar, drinking Seven-Up. Waiting. But now, although she spoke to me much as before, I could sense that she preferred to avoid me. As with Pete, those many faces away, when his discovered knowledge of himself had threatened me and we had chosen to pass like strangers on the street, the face which Sylvia turned to me now was the face of someone who, clearly, in the deep night, wishes passionately—because of that fear of vulnerability in a world in which you have to pretend at toughness—that he could erase from another’s mind the shared remembrances of what has passed between them. But, once, for a moment, we had been Close, and perhaps in that remembered closeness, the real miracle might occur, waiting in a chamber of the mind which could open now more readily, with others. Thursday. The Parade of the Krewe of the Knights of Momus—the mocking spirit expelled from Olympus—will invade New Orleans tonight, four days before Mardi Gras inflames the city at midnight. Floats will sweep the dirty streets trailing gauze like ghost-wings; silverleafed reflecting the choked lights along Canal Street under the winter stars.... Waking up wherever that may be, invariably I’ll feel a sudden apprehension, because now I will have to face the Mirror, which will stare at me lividly—and I’ll look for Someone; but I wont see whom I want to see, but see, instead, in that morning hour (the hour of waking, whether afternoon or night) a strange accusing face:... Myself. With knowing eyes that somehow dont belong: a face violent in its Knowingness, if only so to me.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Plus, Bank of Cal had a branch in Portland. I hurried over and, indeed, they welcomed me, gave me shelter from the storm. And a small line of credit. Still, it was only a short-term solution. They were a bank, after all, and banks were, by definition, risk-averse. Regardless of my sales, Bank of California would soon view my zero cash balances with alarm. I needed to start preparing for that rainy day. My thoughts kept returning to that Japanese trading company. Nissho. Late at night I’d think, “They have $100 billion in sales… and they want desperately to help me . Why?” For starters, Nissho did huge volumes on low net margins, and therefore it loved growth companies with big upsides. That was us. In spades. In the eyes of Wallace and First National we’d been a land mine; to Nissho we were a potential gold mine. So I went back. I met with the man sent from Japan to run the new General Commodities Department, Tom Sumeragi. A graduate of Tokyo University, the Harvard of Japan, Sumeragi looked strikingly like the great film actor Toshiro Mifune, who was famous for his portrayal of Miyamoto Musashi, the epic samurai duelist and author of a timeless manual on combat and inner strength, The Book of Five Rings . Sumeragi looked most like the actor when lipping a Lucky Strike. And he lipped them a lot. Twice as much when he drank. Unlike Hayes, however, who drank because he liked the way booze made him feel, Sumeragi drank because he was lonely in America. Almost every evening after work he’d head to the Blue House, a Japanese bar-restaurant, and talk in his native tongue with the mama-san , which just made him lonelier. He told me that Nissho was willing to take a second position to the bank on their loans. That would certainly quell my bankers. He also offered this nugget of information: Nissho had recently dispatched a delegation to Kobe, to investigate financing shoes for us, and to convince Onitsuka to let such a deal go through. But Onitsuka had thrown the Nissho delegation out on their asses. A $25 million company throwing out a $100 billion company? Nissho was embarrassed, and angry. “We can introduce you to many quality sports shoe manufacturers in Japan,” Sumeragi said, smiling. I pondered. I still held out some hope that Onitsuka would come to its senses. And I worried about a paragraph in our written agreement that forbade me from importing other brands of track-and-field shoes. “Maybe down the road,” I said. Sumeragi nodded. All in good time. REELING FROM ALL this drama, I was deeply tired when I returned home each night. But I’d always get a second wind after my six-mile run, followed by a hot shower and a quick dinner, alone.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Off Hollywood Boulevard—in a pseudo-New-Orleans decor of grillwork and French posters, draped scarlet velvet, dusty winebottles—the gay world of Hollywood finds its headquarters at the Splendide bar: In the subdued amber and pink lights, friendly to its overwhelming, if imposed, guilt, it finds its haven; in its members, it finds its fleeting nightlong meaning (the unsatisfied hunger, the hurried goodbyes after sexual intimacy...). Among its patrons are the Young, the good-looking, the masculine—the sought-after—and, too, the effeminate flutterers posing like languid young ladies, usually imitating the current flatchested heroines of the Screen but not resorting to the hints of drag employed by the much more courageous downtown Los Angeles queens. It was at the Splendide that I first heard of Lance O’Hara. Next to me at the bar sits a blondhaired effeminate fairy talking to a thin dark youngman. “Guess who is back in town?” asked the blond one, answering himself: “Lance!” “Lance O’Hara?” said the dark one, pretending nonchalance. “I didnt even know he was gone!” He sipped his drink studiedly. “Well,” said the blond one, propping an elbow on the bar, hand dangling loosely from the wrist like a tulip, “he did go to New York. He was going to do a Show—but—” He shrugged his skinny shoulders, glancing nervously around. It’s almost the desperate hour and he hasnt made a conquest for Tonight. “Well, you know about Lance’s ‘shows’—they never seem to get Produced any more.... I heard hes working again at one of the studios—but not as an actor.” “How does he look?” asks the other, his head like a swivel, his eyes searching the bar. (When two homosexuals who have no Sexual interest in each other talk in a bar, they seldom look at each other—their eyes scan the bar for a new, Available anyone.) “I havent seen him in years! I thought he’d—Retired!” “Youre exaggerating. We went to his house last summer—remember?—when he acted like he didnt want to see anyone. Anyway, he looks Awful!” he said gleefully. “Youd never believe he’d been the Raving Beauty. Hes simply oh-ful!” “Really?” said the dark-haired fairy, intensely interested now. He touched his face as if to feel if the skin is still smooth. In this world, more than in any other, Youth is a badge; Beauty a treasure. “He might be coming in tonight—and then you can see for yourself.” “I heard he doesnt go to the bars any more.” “Well, he does! ... Oh, look, theres Teddy, (I think hes very cute, dont you?) Teddy! Teddy! (But too femme for me, I like them butch.) Teddy!” “You take what you can get, honey.” “Dont be bitchy. I dont notice anyone cruising you—” and then in a lisping whisper, “—and look at that number near me, hes been staring a hole through me.” “How interesting: a new hole.” And the blond one squeezed like a snake through the thick crowd, to a tight little group, where Teddy obviously was; and hisses: “How are you? ...

• From City of Night (1963)

  Along an area of perhaps two blocks, one block of sand wide from the parking lot to the ocean, the initiates of the world I lived in gathered from the early morning (a face sometimes emerging eerily out of the fog in the first sudden blaze of oceansun) into the late sun-clinging afternoon. All the representatives of that world are here: the queens in extravagant bathing suits, often candy-striped, molded to the thin bodies—tongued sandals somehow worn like slippers; the masculine-acting, looking homosexuals with tapered bodies and brown skins exhibiting themselves lying on the sand, trunks rolled down as far as possible—or going near the ocean as if undecided whether to dive in, posing there bikini-ed, flexing their bodies, walking the long stretch of beach, aware of the eyes which may be focused on them; the older men who sit usually self-consciously covered as much as the beach-weather allows, hoping perhaps for that evasive union, more difficult to find now—ironically now, when the hunger is more powerful, the shrieking loneliness more demanding; the male-hustlers, usually not in trunks, usually shirtless, barefooted, levis-ed, the rest of their clothes wrapped beside them, awaiting whatever Opportunity may come at any moment, clothes, therefore easily accessible for moving quickly for whatever reason. Periodically, throughout the day, the representatives of that world, now centered on the beaches, will move to the small sandwich shop across the parking lot, looking back to see if anyone has followed them there. But, mostly, they will move into the bar a block away: and this is Sally’s bar. As the magic-tanning sun diminishes, Sally’s bar on weekends is crammed with oiled malebodies rubbing sensually against each other, hands openly exploring. Forced laughter drowns the vomiting of the jukebox. I had seen in Lance’s look—in that look as, perhaps, he tried to expiate his guilt and calm the haunting vengeance of a sad old man—I had seen that faint glimmer of compassion, for Dean—and therefore, now, the barest hint of a capacity to attempt to love—someone!... That look had frightened me. And I fled from it. And during those summer-beach days, I drove myself furiously: sometimes making it and quickly returning to the beach, leaving again with someone else: faces confused with others, the hurried intimacy remembered perhaps days or weeks later. Those summerdays spent mostly in Santa Monica, I would hear often of a youngman named Glen—a smallish blond youngman I would see every day on the beach. A few summers ago, he had been one of the most desirable hustlers on the beach: “Simply everyone,” a score told me, “wanted Glen—then—but, now—well, everyone’s used to him: There are so many new faces each summer. If Glen were smart, he’d move somewhere else, where they dont know how old he is. At first, Glen was strictly trade. Now—well—... He’ll do everything!” “After a while,” another man told me, “Glen will be out of the hustling ranks.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I was alive, yes, but exhausted. I felt as if I were built of wool. Grey, loose-spun wool on an aching set of bones. My walks with the hawk were stressful, requiring endless vigilance, and they were wearing me away. As the hawk became tamer I was growing wilder. Fear was contagious: it rose unbidden in my heart as people approached us. I was no longer certain if the hawk bated because she was frightened of what she saw, or if the terror she felt was mine. And something else had happened on our walks. We had become invisible. The people passing by didn’t stop, didn’t look, sent not even a sideways glance in our direction. Some part of me began to believe that they didn’t see us at all; that we were walking in another dimension, as if we were ghosts, or they were. I thought of those goshawks I’d seen as a child staring out at a winter afternoon from the world I now inhabited. And at night, at home, I stood at the window watching the lights outside, pressing my forehead against the pane to feel the faint ticking of summer rain through glass and bone. Everyone saw us. Of course they did. A woman stalking the park with a bloody great hawk on her fist and a baleful stare on her face is hardly inconspicuous. Everyone saw us; they just pretended they hadn’t. But some people were brave enough to look. The next morning, for example, standing in thin rain watching flotillas of umbrellas move across the park, I notice a man. He stands against a fence twenty feet away, hands resting equably on the wooden rail, watching us with a face as expressionless as if he were regarding horses in a field. I walk over and say hello. He is from Kazakhstan, he says, and we talk about my hawk, and about Kazakh falconers, berkutchi, who fly golden eagles from horseback as they have done for thousands of years. He has never seen the eagles, he says, because he lives in a city. In Almaty. He asks if my hawk has a hood. I give it to him. He turns it in his hands, nods at its workmanship, gives it back to me. Only then do we properly introduce ourselves. His name is Kanat. He asks where I will hunt with the hawk. ‘On farmland a few miles from here,’ I reply. He nods, looks searchingly at Mabel, and is silent for a long time. Then he spreads his fingers wide on the wooden rail and stares at the backs of his hands and at the cuffs of his brown leather jacket. ‘I miss my country,’ he says.

• From Educated (2018)

  I could hear Shannon and Mary in the kitchen. I put on my Sunday dress and the three of us walked to church. Because it was a congregation of students, everyone was sitting with their roommates, so I settled into a pew with mine. Shannon immediately began chatting with the girl behind us. I looked around the chapel and was again struck by how many women were wearing skirts cut above the knee. The girl talking to Shannon said we should come over that afternoon to see a movie. Mary and Shannon agreed but I shook my head. I didn’t watch movies on Sunday. Shannon rolled her eyes. “She’s very devout,” she whispered. I’d always known that my father believed in a different God. As a child, I’d been aware that although my family attended the same church as everyone in our town, our religion was not the same. They believed in modesty; we practiced it. They believed in God’s power to heal; we left our injuries in God’s hands. They believed in preparing for the Second Coming; we were actually prepared. For as long as I could remember, I’d known that the members of my own family were the only true Mormons I had ever known, and yet for some reason, here at this university, in this chapel, for the first time I felt the immensity of the gap. I understood now: I could stand with my family, or with the gentiles, on the one side or the other, but there was no foothold in between. The service ended and we filed into Sunday school. Shannon and Mary chose seats near the front. They saved me one but I hesitated, thinking of how I’d broken the Sabbath. I’d been here less than a week, and already I had robbed the Lord of an hour. Perhaps that was why Dad hadn’t wanted me to come: because he knew that by living with them, with people whose faith was less, I risked becoming like them. Shannon waved to me and her V-neck plunged. I walked past her and folded myself into a corner, as far from Shannon and Mary as I could get. I was pleased by the familiarity of the arrangement: me, pressed into the corner, away from the other children, a precise reproduction of every Sunday school lesson from my childhood. It was the only sensation of familiarity I’d felt since coming to this place, and I relished it. [image "Chapter 18 Blood and Feathers" file=Image00020.jpg] After that, I rarely spoke to Shannon or Mary and they rarely spoke to me, except to remind me to do my share of the chores, which I never did. The apartment looked fine to me. So what if there were rotting peaches in the fridge and dirty dishes in the sink? So what if the smell slapped you in the face when you came through the door?

• From City of Night (1963)

  Ive begun to wonder if theres any use even staying with her,” he said. “Does she know?” It was a square question—the kind of question I would not ordinarily have asked; but, having eased the street pose, Im reacting completely differently to him, responding to that evident struggle within him—the eminent Aloneness.... “Theres nothing to know,” he said almost sharply resentfully. He sighed, relenting. “Well. I guess I dont really know myself if she knows or not. She knows something is wrong. She couldnt help knowing that. The kid—hes the one that worries me. I mean—he—well, what would it feel like to find out your father is a—...” “Lets get off the street,” I said, stopping him. “Ive still got to rent a place to stay tonight,” he said. “Ive been staying at different motels. It’s been about a week since I left—home—and, until today, I havent spoken to anyone.... But, God! how Ive wanted to.... I guess—” he smiled. “—I guess I look too suspicious for anyone to speak to me. I heard someone on the beach say I looked like a plainclothesman.” I wonder why I will stay with him—and I knew I would. At the same time that I feel he needs me—someone—that he is desperately alone—something else in me insists that I leave. “We’ll get a motel here, all right?” he asked. “Sure,” I said. “And we can go to the beach tomorrow.... Will you stay with me the rest of my vacation?” he asked hurriedly. And as if understanding something, as if defensively beating me to it, canceling out the possibility that I would bring it up—which I would not have—he said: “Ive got enough money for both of us. I mean, after all—friends should—...” Friends! I had just met him, such a short time earlier. I wanted to say something that would be very right—to do something: even, I thought cornily, to shake hands with him. But I could find nothing to say, nothing to do. At a motel across from the beach, the man at the desk asked: “Two beds?” “Yes,” the man Im with answers embarrassed. Through the wide window inside the room, I can see the ocean extending to the end of the sky. The man turns the television on. For minutes we remain wordless. Several times I still want to leave. He said as if reading my mind: “Do you want to stay with me?” At any other time I might have interpreted this as a kind of rejection, implied. With him, I was convinced he wants me to stay. “Yes,” I answered. I sat back on one bed, he sat back on the other. For several hours, making occasional forced comments about the programs, we watched television. Outside, the night has shrouded the sky.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  They leaned back, gazed at each other, astonished. Now, to my astonishment, they began pitching me . “Would Blue Ribbon… be interested… in representing Tiger shoes? In the United States?” “Yes,” I said. “Yes, it would.” I held forth the Limber Up. “This is a good shoe,” I said. “This shoe—I can sell this shoe.” I asked them to ship me samples right away. I gave them my address and promised to send them a money order for fifty dollars. They stood. They bowed deeply. I bowed deeply. We shook hands. I bowed again. They bowed again. We all smiled. The war had never happened. We were partners. We were brothers. The meeting, which I’d expected to last fifteen minutes, had gone two hours. From Onitsuka I went straight to the nearest American Express office and sent a letter to my father. Dear Dad: Urgent. Please wire fifty dollars right away to Onitsuka Corp of Kobe. Ho ho, hee hee… strange things are happening. BACK IN MY hotel I walked in circles around my tatami mat, trying to decide. Part of me wanted to race back to Oregon, wait for those samples, get a jump on my new business venture. Also, I was crazed with loneliness, cut off from everything and everyone I knew. The occasional sight of a New York Times , or a Time magazine, gave me a lump in my throat. I was a castaway, a kind of modern Crusoe. I wanted to be home again. Now. And yet. I was still aflame with curiosity about the world. I still wanted to see, to explore. Curiosity won. I went to Hong Kong and walked the mad, chaotic streets, horrified by the sight of legless, armless beggars, old men kneeling in filth, alongside pleading orphans. The old men were mute, but the children had a cry they repeated: Hey, rich man, hey, rich man, hey, rich man. Then they’d weep or slap the ground. Even after I gave them all the money in my pockets, the cry never stopped. I went to the edge of the city, climbed to the top of Victoria Peak, gazed off into the distance at China. In college I’d read the analects of Confucius— The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones— and now I felt strongly that I’d never have a chance to move this particular mountain. I’d never get any closer to that walled-off mystical land, and it made me feel unaccountably sad. Incomplete. I went to the Philippines, which had all the madness and chaos of Hong Kong, and twice the poverty. I moved slowly, as if in a nightmare, through Manila, through endless crowds and fathomless gridlock, toward the hotel where MacArthur once occupied the penthouse. I was fascinated by all the great generals, from Alexander the Great to George Patton. I hated war, but I loved the warrior spirit. I hated the sword, but loved the samurai.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And the moviehouse toilets on 42nd Street and the toilets in the subways—with the pleading scrawled messages—form the boiling subterranean world of Times Square. Steps lead down from the moviehouse lobbies as if into a dungeon—and in the toilet, the purpose may be realized, and you walk up the steps—aware of the danger after the danger is over—you and he complete strangers again after the cold intimacy. You may move from the dungeon into the cavern of the moviebalconies and try to score again: swallowed instantly by that giant wolfmouth of dark at the opening of which the dreamworld of a certain movie is being projected: the actors like ghosts from an altogether Different world.... By now winter was approaching in New York. Hurricanes and threats of hurricanes had stopped, and the air was clear. Daily the leaves turned browner, the orange disappeared. Along the walks in the parks, leaves fell like rejected brown stars. As the weather had changed, from hurricane warnings to cool, I had stood along 42nd Street and Bryant Park waiting to be picked up, and with the changing season I felt a change within me too: a frantic lonesomeness that sometimes took me, paradoxically, to the height of elation, then flung me into depression. The figure of my Mother standing by the kitchen door crying, watching me leave, hovered ghostlike over me, but in the absence of that overwhelming tearing love—away from it if only physically—I felt a violent craving for something indefinable. Throughout those weeks, on 42nd Street, the park, the moviehouses, I had learned to sift the different types that haunted those places: The queens swished by in superficial gayety—giggling males acting like teenage girls; eyeing the youngmen coquettishly: but seldom offering more than a place to stay for the night. And I could spot the scores easily—the men who paid other men sexmoney, anywhere from $5.00—usually more—but sometimes even less (for some, meals and drinks and a place to stay); the amount determined by the time of the day, the day of the week, the place of execution of the sexscene: their apartment, a rented room, a public toilet; their franticness, your franticness; their manner of dress, indicating affluence or otherwise; the competition on the street—the other youngmen stationed along the block like tattered guards for that defeated army which, Somehow, life had spewed out, Rejected. I found that you cant always tell a score by his age or appearance: There are the young and the goodlooking ones—the ones about whom you wonder why they prefer to pay someone (who will most likely at least not indicate desiring them back) when there exists—much, much vaster than the hustling world—the world of unpaid, mutually desiring males—the easy pickups....

• From City of Night (1963)

  Sitting there with Pete, a great Loneliness overwhelmed me. Was it the sky? So like a Texas sky at night—the stars flung prodigiously in the expansive blackness. Or the sudden breathtaking memory of my Mother miles away? Her love radiates that great distance toward me stifling me.... Or was it the sudden change in the park? The youngmen and girls had left—the older people were gone from the benches too. Now there remain only the hunting young homosexuals looking for a partner. They sit momentarily on benches, move away, stand restlessly. One sat near us. “You figure he thinks we’re queer?” Pete asked me indignantly—and then he stared him away.... I wondered if the franticness of their search was overwhelming Pete as it was me; he was strangely silent... Two youngmen walked by. Previously I had seen them standing a few feet apart, on the walk, moving slowly closer to each other. Then they had talked briefly—now they walked away together, speaking softly. They were both young, both goodlooking. I saw them smile at each other: For them, this night’s search was over—not for money—but for a mutual, if fleeting, sharing. Staring after them, Pete says: “They coulda fooled me, even. They look like hustlers, dont they? And I bet theyre gonna make it with each other.” We move along Fifth Avenue, past a dimlit bar in a hotel. Through the windows we see a woman playing the piano. A man is leaning over her, her lips move in a song, she slides closer to him.... We pause for a while, and then we continue walking—into Union Square now, were we stand listening to a man in a tight suit heatedly hollering about what a blight Union Square is. “Perverts and tramps!” he yells. And a little old tramp staggers up to him, he reeks of wine, his nose like a red lightbulb—and he shakes his old finger unsteadily at the man yelling out damnation and says: clearly: “Listenere, you—you jes listenere: Theres gonna be hobos! homos! and momos! in Our Park long after youve grown deaf and dumb!” “Hey, spote,” says Pete to me, “whats a momo?” “I dont know, I guess he just made it up.” “Thats cute,” says Pete. “Homos, hobos and—and—what?” “Momos,” I said. “Yeah: Momos. Hey! Maybe we’re momos!” he laughs. Weve reached the 34th Street, the corner of the Armory on Park Avenue. “Heres where I live,” I told Pete now. “Can I come up and talk a while?” he asked me, rushing the words together. “Im tired,” I said quickly. “Cummon,” he insisted, “it’s early yet—or you can come up with me Im still staying at Al’s with all the motorcycle jackets.