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)

  And God will cringe!” Now Miss Destiny leans toward me and I can smell the sweet liquor and the sweet... lost... perfume—and with a franticness that only abysmal loneliness can produce, she whispered. “Marry me please, dear!” 2 Those first days in Los Angeles, I was newly dazzled by the world into which my compulsive journey through submerged lives had led me—newly hypnotized by the life of the streets. I had rented a room in a hotel on Hope Street—on the fringes of that world but still outside of it (in order always to have a place where I could be completely alone when I must be). Thus the daulity of my existence was marked by a definite boundary: Pershing Square: east of there when the desire to be with people churned within me; west of there to the hotel when I had to be alone.... At times, after having combed the bars, the streets, the park, I would flee as if for protection to that hotel room. Yet other times I needed people fiercely—needed the anarchy of the streets.... And Main Street in Los Angeles is such an anarchy. This is clip street, hustle street—frenzied-nightactivity street: the moving back and forth against the walls; smoking, peering anxiously to spot the bulls before they spot you; the rushing in and out of Wally’s and Harry’s: long crowded malehustling bars. And here too are the fairyqueens—the queens from Everywhere, America—the queenly exiles looking for new “husbands” restlessly among the vagrant hustlers with no place to stay, and the hustlers will often clip the queens (if there is anything to clip), and the queens will go on looking for their own legendary permanent “Daddies” among the older men who dig the queens’ special brand of gone sexplay, seldom finding those permanent connections, and living in Main and Spring Street holes: sometimes making it (employed and unemployed, taking their daddies and being taken by the hustlers)—sometimes hardly, sometimes not at all. And the malehustlers live with them off and on, making it from bar to lonesome room, bragging about the $50 score with the fruit from Bel Air who has two swimming pools, jack, and said he’d see you again (but if he didnt show, you dont say that), and youre clinching a dime and a nickel for draft beer at Wally’s or Harry’s or the 1-2-3 or Ji-Ji’s so you can go inside and score early, and make it with one of the vagrant young girls to prove to yourself you’re still All Right. And so Main Street is an anarchy where the only rule is Make It!... And the only reminders of the world beyond its boundaries are the police wagons that cruise the streets—the cops that pick you at random out of Hooper’s all-night coffee shop after 2:00 in the morning.... The free jammed ride to the glasshouse for fingerprints... Rock-n-roll sounds fill the rancid air. This was the world I joined.

• From City of Night (1963)

  I felt guilty, as if I had committed a crime—and the only crime had been in making me feel guilty.)... But, yes,” he went on, “with those two, you left their dream, but you entered your own reality. And that can be much more important.” And as I listened to this man’s words over the sounds of the Carnival—the thundering street noises, the steadfast clashing and clamoring—I had a sudden feeling of having been dreaming for very long. Rather, of having been in someone else’s dream. And how many other dreams? How many of all the people I had known had ever begun to know me? Had even wanted to? Perhaps thats why I listen to Jeremy—to words which would ordinarily have sent me away—because he seems to want to know me, because even when the words themselves are cruel, they seem to be spoken in understanding.... Of course, I had hidden purposely from the others. Yes, even from Dave, who might eventually have said the same things, who had in a way prepared me so that Im able to listen to Jeremy now. And it had been at that point—when some of these same words might have been spoken by him—that I had fled from Dave.... No, not even the Professor, certainly, whose obsessive wordhunt “for me” had been merely for himself, by himself, of himself, discovering himself in his own “interviews” (as he measured out his life—or more exactly the length of his sustaining hope... on a tape-measure): no, he had not even vaguely approached me .... The Professor.... Out of all those words—that torrential, tortured flow relating the interludes of his life—those few word-jammed “interviews,” what had the Professor revealed? A craving for love, of course. Yet... and yet he had had it, had it in the malenurse whose name suddenly eluded me. But he had sought out, instead, as if in a dream, the fleeting contacts with the “angels,” who couldnt—or wouldnt—love him back—had sought them out knowing that, like a dream, they would fly away from him. And so he, also, had inherited that pervading suspicion; and he had fled toward desire, away from “love.”... Invading the dreams of others who search in you not what there really is but what they want to find.... Neil... the lost searched father trapped in sexual masquerade.... And all, all, all the others for whom one exists as an aspect, merely, of those unfulfilled dreams. Their lives—their days-long, years-long, life-long dreaming—continuing long after youve exited into someone else’s dream—having witnessed only a bare pinpoint of their lives, which will go on without you: continuing, those dreams, those terribly lonely nightmares, made tolerable, out of despair, only by their very recurrence.... And how will I be remembered, if at all, by those hundreds and hundreds of nightpeople in that long goodbye that life turns into?

• From City of Night (1963)

  After long moments of staring at me, unwinding the tape-measure, winding it again, puffing elegantly on the pastel-blue cigarette, the old man, propped halfway up in the hospital bed, said finally: “Well!” And his fleshy face shaped a smile—molded as if on pink clay. “Im not one bit disappointed,” he announced grandly. “But then I never am—thanks to Larry here,” acknowledging the malenurse. “Larry knows my subtlest moods, my changing (oh, so changing!) tastes—and hes only been with me—how long, Larry?” The malenurse answers quickly: “Four months, Professor.” “Ah, yes, of course, four months!” The man in bed goes on: “It’s unfortunate that the world doesnt recognize talent like Larry’s openly. Larry would be an Enormous Success. But then there are many things the world doesnt recognize. Yes.... Fine, Larry, now, if youll excuse us—” The malenurse walks out, almost brushing my shoulder, without looking at me. “My dear youngman,” the old man announces, “you are about to join the ranks of: My Angels!” 3 I had been home only a few minutes that night when I received a telegram: ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY THAT YOU COMMUNICATE WITH ME TOMORROW. I KNOW YOU WILL NOT DENY ME THIS HELP ASKED OF YOU IN ALL HUMILITY. I BANK UPON YOUR GOOD WILL AND THE SENSE OF SUPPORT THIS CONTACT NOW WILL MEAN TO ME. COME AS EARLY AS YOU CAN. REMEMBER G IS L. “Who is it from, sweetie?” said Gene de Lancey, following me into the room. (“I cant sleep,” she had explained in the hallway. “I just gotta have one little cigarette with you, lambie.”) She peered at the telegram. “It’s from someone I just met,” I told her. I knew it would be a very long time now before I got to sleep. “Everyone’s so Lonesome,” Gene de Lancey sighed. Early the next morning I went for my second “interview” with the Professor. The malenurse opened the door. “The Professor is asleep right now,” he said, eyeing me coldly. “He had a very bad night.... Youll have to wait out here,” he said. I was about to sit down when I heard the Professor’s voice from the half-opened door leading to his room. “Larry? Larry, who is there?” The malenurse eyes me with hatred, goes to the room. He returned: “Hes awake now; go in.” I had expected, because of the urgency of the telegram, to find the Professor in a state of desperation. He wasnt: He lay smiling on the bed. “Ah, child, child, you did come.... No, I wasnt asleep—I had just adjusted my hearing aid—I dont want to miss out on any of its fitful morning gossip!... I am Delighted you came. Not that I didnt expect you to show up. I can tell sincerity just as I can guess weights, ages, heights—you see, I have not lived these sixty-odd years without learning something—and I must pass on to you some of the things I have learned of this ambiguous existence we call life.

• From City of Night (1963)

  A short distance away, Chuck turned back to look at me, pushed the hat momentarily back on his head, and his mouth formed the word again: “Hoddawg!” He winked broadly—and then in a genuine cowboy gait, he swaggered toward the girl, who, aware now that he was coming after her, wiggled her butt cutely. CITY OF NIGHT AMONG THE BANDS OF MALEHUSTLERS that hang out in downtown Los Angeles, there are often a few stray girls: They are quite young, usually prematurely hardened, toughlooking even when theyre pretty. They know all about the youngmen they make it with and sometimes live with: that those youngmen hustle and clip other males. And aware of this, they dont seem to care. Occasionally, one of those girls will go into the park with a malehustler, sitting there until he will maybe spot a score; and then, as if by tacit agreement, theyll split: the youngman going off with the score, the girl back to Hooper’s coffee-and-donuts, where, in the afternoons at that time, they usually hung out. One among them intrigued me especially. She was the prettiest—about 19, with long ashblonde hair and hypnotic eyes. She always looked at you with a half-smile that was somehow wistful, as if for her the world, though sad, still amused her. I knew from Buddy, who had been with her and who dug her (“But shes kinda strange,” he said, “like she aint always there”), that she lived with three malehustlers in a small downtown apartment—one of them the squarefaced youngman I had been interrogated with that afternoon in Pershing Square.... She was very hip—she talked like all the rest, and very tough. But with her, somehow, it all seemed wrong, incongruous in a way I couldnt really understand. It wasnt only that she was so pretty; some of the others were too. It was something else, something altogether different about her from the others.... A kind of toughmasked lonesomeness. One afternoon, at Hooper’s, I sat near her at the counter. Outside, the cops had stopped a madeup queen. The girl next to me smiles and says: “Oh, oh, another queen busted—for “jay-walking.’” I moved next to her, and for the next few minutes we spoke easily. Then I caught her looking at me very strangely. She says unexpectedly: “You know, man, theres something that bugs me about you. Ive seen you in the park and around here, and you look like all the others—but theres something else.” I was surprised to hear her say about me precisely what I thought about her. At the same time, I panicked: I don’t like people to know me too well.... “I mean,” she went on, “like you never really hang around too much with the others—and you dont talk to anyone too much.”... We left Hooper’s and went into the park, sitting there briefly, listening to the afternoon preachers.

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

  AT THE START of summer I decided my parents’ basement was no longer big enough to serve as the headquarters of Blue Ribbon. And the servants’ quarters weren’t big enough for me. I rented a one-bedroom apartment downtown, in a spiffy new high-rise. The rent was two hundred dollars, which seemed pretty steep, but oh well. I also rented a few essentials—table, chairs, king-sized bed, olive couch—and tried to arrange them stylishly. It didn’t look like much, but I didn’t care, because my real furniture was shoes. My first-ever bachelor pad was filled from floor to ceiling with shoes. I toyed with the idea of not giving Johnson my new address. But I did. Sure enough, my new mailbox began to fill with letters. Return address: P.O. Box 492, Seal Beach, CA 90740. None of which I answered. THEN JOHNSON WROTE me two letters I couldn’t ignore. First, he said that he, too, was moving. He and his new wife were splitting up. He was planning to stay in Seal Beach, but taking a small bachelor apartment. Days later he wrote to say he’d been in a car wreck. It happened in the early morning, somewhere north of San Bernardino. He was on his way to a road race, of course, where he’d intended to both run and sell Tigers. He’d fallen asleep at the wheel, he wrote, and woke to find himself and his 1956 Volkswagen Bug upside down and airborne. He struck the divider, then rolled, then flew out of the car, just before it somersaulted down the embankment. When Johnson’s body finally stopped tumbling, he was on his back, looking at the sky, his collarbone, foot, and skull all shattered. The skull, he said, was actually leaking. Worse, being newly divorced, he had no one to care for him during his convalescence. The poor guy was one dead dog from becoming a country-western song. Despite all these recent calamities, Johnson was of good cheer. He assured me in a series of chirpy follow-up letters that he was managing to meet all his obligations. He was dragging himself around his new apartment, filling orders, shipping shoes, corresponding promptly with all customers. A friend was bringing him his mail, he said, so not to worry, P.O. Box 492 was still fully operational. In closing, he added that because he was now facing alimony, child support, and untold medical bills, he needed to inquire about the long-term prospects of Blue Ribbon. How did I see the future? I didn’t lie... exactly. Maybe out of pity, maybe haunted by the image of Johnson, single, lonely, his body wrapped in plaster of Paris, gamely trying to keep himself and my company alive, I sounded an upbeat tone. Blue Ribbon, I said, would probably morph over the years into a generalized sporting goods company. We’d probably have offices on the West Coast. And one day, maybe, in Japan. “Farfetched,” I wrote. “But it seems worth shooting for.” This last line was wholly truthful.

• From City of Night (1963)

  I mean; just living in the world you find yourself in—with its own rules, considering everything—yes—but theres got to be rules!” She stared into the empty bar, at the shattered mirror. Yes, it was exactly as if she had been clarifying something, rather unconvincingly, for herself—speaking words shes probably spoken to others many times, memorized now—as if she were torn between a compulsion to understand, to accept—and an innate tendency to reject.... And I wonder to what extent she really believes she can impose rules on the flagrant anarchy. “Why the hell did you come to New Orleans?” she asked me tiredly, as if shes used to getting an inadequate answer. “For the Carnival,” I told her simply. “And something else,” she said to herself. “Beyond the parades and—... the rest.” “I guess youre right,” I admitted uneasily. “Theres always something else,” she said. “Ive been in New Orleans—oh, several years. I came directly from New York—right after my last divorce,” she added pointedly; I had the feeling she was trying to indicate to me that shes been married several times. “Why did you come here?” I asked her. She waited a long while before answering. “I came down here—... for the Carnival. Like you,” she added with bitter sarcasm. Then she looked at me curiously, as if suddenly I had become a complete stranger with whom she had found herself accidentally speaking intimately. She got up quickly, and she went through the lighted kitchen—to take, I suspected, the knife from the wounded boy.... Sailing in out of the dark in Sylvia’s wake, a painted queen stood over me. “Im Whorina, darling, and I like you,” she said. CITY OF NIGHT THOSE DAYS.... Those New Orleans carnival days, divided for me not by clock-hours but by the many, many faces. Vicissitude of sex-locked rooms. Those face-crammed days in which time existed in the one dimension of Now, immediately. In which I took pills indiscriminately to keep me awake—pills passed from one person to another with more abandon than a cigarette is offered. In which I made it several times a day, often only pretending to come. In which I rushed through the barcrowds crushed like communal massed lovers—as the fugitive armies, expelled shortly from the other nightcities, came daily in restless tides to join that procession before Ash Wednesday. And occasionally I will remember—during those teeming French Quarter days, like a startlingly recalled dream of long ago—things forgotten for long returning as phantom-memories—and suddenly I’ll remember the processions in El Paso when the people marched chanting to the top of the mountain where the statue of Christ looked down, pityingly, arms outstretched—but instead of devout-faced men and women chanting prayers, instead of the priests in bright robes, there will be, now, in New Orleans, soon, only days away, on Shrove Tuesday, the masked clowns, the twisting snakedancing revelers.... The seminude sweating bodies writhing along the streets.

• From City of Night (1963)

  As I remembered those short, short, short interludes with the streetpeople (sometimes remembered with wryness, sometimes with huge sadness for something undiscovered within them), would they also remember me?—as someone of a long line who had expelled, with them, mementarily, the loneliness: yet, ironically, increased it perhaps in the instants following the vagrant soon-to-recur contacts—with others? I had an acute sense of the incompleteness intrinsic in sharing in another’s life. You touch those other lives, barely—however intimately it may be sexually—you may sense things roiling in them. Yet the climax in your immediate relationship with them is merely an interlude. Their lives will continue, youll merely step out. A series of encounters multiplying geometrically.... A prismatic network of... (I remember the Professor, I see the tiny eyes behind the thick glasses) “interviews.” Like mechanical dolls, people around me along the blocks proceed doggedly to their various morning destinations; wait, mobbed, at the stoplights, restlessly pausing before rushing at each other, meeting in a melée in the middle of the street. They will brush shoulders, unaware, stumble, move on: each person enclosed by his own immediate world. Suddenly, unexplainably, I wanted to laugh. The grinding journey to—... Where? In a few days, by the beginning of autumn, I was back in El Paso. As I opened the door of my mother’s house, I saw her standing there waiting for me. She hugged me fiercely to her, and I glanced beyond her at the fragile case with the glass angels.... Now there were steps to retrace. I called the girl I had climbed Cristo Rey with. Her father answered: She was gone; married; she had a baby.... Alone, I returned to climb that mountain. Here, on Holy days, I had seen long processions of people from El Paso, Ysleta, Canutillo, Smeltertown, Juarez, as they marched up chanting devout prayers—kneeling at intervals, shawled ladies gripping rosaries. The priests leading the procession; men carrying sadfaced saints.... Under the hot white sun, I had wanted to be... then... a part of that belief that transfixed those faces as they climbed. And at the top of that mountain—now, years later—I wondered suddenly if emotionally I had really ever left this city. Almost physically, as I walked down, I could feel those very mountains which awesomely rim the city crushing me as in that childhood dream. But of course it was something else: the memories of that childhood which I had tried to bandage by fleeing the spurious innocence. Returning here again, I felt how easily I could regress to those early attitudes. The memory of the guarded isolation of that window (in that house which we had vacated, that house where my dog had died) drew me again to a craving for a powerful symbolic window away from the world.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Better fine you someone to shack with,” he advises me. Aware that I was staring at the savage painting, he drawled: “This heres a picture of Nawleans.”... And he slashed at the canvas in a purple, dripping stroke.... Now walking along that punctured area of old New Orleans, I see those famous hints of a world that disappeared long ago: depicted, sheltered like a precious memory, in books: a world that left merely the remnants of what may have been; a city scarred by memories of an elegance and gentility which may never have existed. A ghost city. The streets narrow, as if the ocean world of cities has now taken the slower, more sluggish avenues of a crooked river. Attempting futilely to hide beyond the closed doors of courtyards, beyond the grilled ironwork that still surrounds some balconies like rusted spiderwebs, houses drunkenly lopsided (leaning toward the streets as if, given half a chance, in a rubble of wood and stone and oxidated grillwork, they will topple vindictively over those on the other side) hover over the courtyard walls like grotesque, indomitable, painted old women peering into the streets. Ugly dank places—the ones they call Enchanting in the travel folders; houses tenebrously rising in tiers of shuttered windows above shredded walls; the pallid historical buildings from a timepast of gilded elegance.... An almost Biblical feeling of Doom—of the city about to be destroyed, razed, toppled—assaults you. The odor of something stagnant permeates the winter-air of this summercity: not so much an odor that attacks the sense of smell as one that raids the mind.... The invitation to dissipate is everywhere. And you wonder how this city has withstood so long the ravenous vermin—the rats, cockroaches which surely hibernate here even in winter. And you wonder how one single match or cigarette has failed to create that holocaust which will consume it to its very gutters.... About Jackson Square, portrait artists line the walks into Pirates Alley, imprisoning on paper the pastel smiles of tourists. General Jackson’s stone horse, in the center of the square, seems to balk at the sight. “Let me draw you, honey,” a woman coaxed me. In a whisper she adds: “I’ll do it for free”—obviously because all the other portraitmakers are occupied, at $2, $5, and $7 a head, and she feels so Lonesome and Ugly—so lonesome and Unwanted. But I walk instead through the blocks of fish-redolent, color-splashed French Market nearby; along the docks—wondering exactly why I have come to this city. This decaying city has a hypnotic aspect that leads me through its streets: this city in preparation—I think suddenly (and I stare at St Louis Cathedral, which looms like a gray fortress barricaded for War)—for the confessional ritual before Ash Wednesday. Before a candy shop in a shabby district, a stuffed black mammy has a punctured breast revealing very white cotton insides. An ovaled man has been following me for about a block.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Then catching sight of an obviously intrigued man-in-a-suit, he goes and sits next to him. Like all the others warned to stay out of the park, I continued to return and the fat cop didnt bother me. And this is how they do, unless youre wanted for something definite: They warn you to stay out, they leave you alone—and then when the heat is on (when some robbery supposedly involving a young Pershing Square vagrant has been headlined in the papers—or, as I had heard Trudi describe it once at the 1-2-3, “when Officer Morgan is going through her period”), they pick you up for vagrancy. And the papers gleefully announce: RAID IN PERSHING SQUARE. Now, as the anarchy welled inside me, I went through each day on pills and marijuana. And then one afternoon, High, sitting in the park, hearing the convulsed chanting, the spiritual singing—in the midst of the lonesome hunting, the sexual hunger in the eyes all around—the franticness to fill each space of time with something! —I imagined— Suddenly! as if in a nightmare—as the crowds emerged from the depths of the subterranean garage, swarmed from across the streets—that all the world was pouring into Pershing Square in a tidal wave of faces—that frantically each person would shout his Loss—into Eternity—to an uncaring Heaven! In panic, I returned to that rented room on Hope Street I shut the windows, drew the shades, bolted the door. Still, I could hear life shrieking at me.... Now again there came a time when I stayed away from the streets. I took a job.... Again the guilt. At night I found relief from the strange terror in the joints of marijuana which I smoked on the roof of that hotel. As the false clarity of the weed seized me, I would look onto the city showered by the black of the Night—and imagine, as if in a dumb show in which all emotion is muted, that I was separated from the world: as I had felt as a boy watching out the window, separated from life. The world was revealing its death to me by the process of slow discovery: the slowly gnawing loss of innocence; and I found myself longing for the God in Whom, unquestioningly, I had believed as a child. But this world of loneliness and desperation belied Him. The sky was now a black cave where once it had been limitless, stretching into that Heaven of childhood angels and peace. As the doleful sounds of the bells from the church across the street mourned into the night, I looked from the roof in the direction of Pershing Square: One day, in sorrow at His own creation, God plunged into Hell.... Now the world spun dizzily like a ferris wheel out of control . 2 The sun is shifting, shadows stretching. And the Pershing Square panorama, in preparation for the night, is exhibiting itself in all its flashy afternoon shreds.

• From City of Night (1963)

  (Like in the game of statues long ago and someone swung you round and round and you stayed frozen as you fell, and the angel is the swinger now....) And Miss Destiny went on desperately: “And I know it sounds crazy but I came here believing—no, not really Believing—but hoping maybe, maybe somehow crazily hoping! —that some producer would see me, think I was Real—Discover me!—make me a Big Star! and I would go to the dazzling premieres and Louella Hopper would interview me and we would stand in the spotlights and no one would ever know I wasnt Real—” (That impossible strange something that will never happen....) And Miss Destiny rushes on feverishly: “And at night in bed drowning in the dark, I think tomorrow will be just like today—but I’ll be older—or I come unexpectedly on myself in a mirror or a reflection in a window, and it takes my breath: Me!! ... And I think about my wedding and how Fabulous I’ll be—but I want to fly out of my skin! jump out! be someone else! so I can leave Miss Destiny far, far behind....” (And Miss Destiny wakes up at night terrified by the knowledge of that strange impossibility, and the darkness screams Loneliness! and impossibility, whirling around us—and soon youll have to face the morning and yourself—the same, again....) In the other room someone yelled, and it was the nympho. I heard Chuck shouting Whoooooooppeeeee!!... and Darling Dolly shrieked: “Chuck, get off!—thats Buddy!” And Lola came out rushing yelling at no one, “Leave me alone! Im ugly! Im ugly!”—her face smeared grotesquely with paint and enormous tears—“Im ugly, Im ugleeeeeeeee!” and Trudi trying to soothe her with her fur stole—momentarily leaving Skipper, who is passed out drunk.... “All this is going on,” Miss Destiny sighed, hugging the orphan doll, “and when tomorrow someone will maybe ask us, What did you do last night?—we’ll answer, Nothing.... And, oh, do you believe in God?” she asks me abruptly, and I answered it’s a cussword. “Oh, yes, my dear,” Miss Destiny said, “there is a God, and He is one hell of a joker. Just—look—” and she indicates her lovely green satin dress and then waves her hand over the entire room. “Trapped! ... But one day, in the most lavish drag youve evuh seen—heels! and gown! and beads! and spangled earrings!—Im going to storm heaven and protest! Here I am!!!!! I’ll yell—and I’ll shake my beads at Him....

• From City of Night (1963)

  He says that in a jocular tone, but his eyes are fixed on Neil with unequivocal hatred. “And later,” Carl sighs, “when I heard of someone new, I was waiting for him!” Neil laughs—but nervously. He comes in illogically, whether to change the subject or whether still obsessed by the kid who had clipped his guns: “Sometimes, you know, sometimes I can still get aroused by the—... naked... body.” Carl’s transformation has become complete: All the masculinity has been drained out of him as if by the liquor. His legs are curling one over the other. The once rigidly held shoulders have softened. The hand that had held the wineglass tightly, now balanced it delicately with two dainty fingers, the others sticking out gracefully curved. His look liddedly mellowed, and he began to thrust flirtatious glances in my direction. “Im Unhappy,” he drooled in wine-tones. “Strength!” Neil shouted, trying to square his shoulders. “Remember, Carl: Strength Is The Only Answer!” “Strength?” Carl asked dazedly. “You know—know wotlwan, Neil? Wanna know why Im Unhappy, baby?” he said to me. “Because Ive sunk too far into a world where sex aint even sex no more.... They talk about sex without love. What about sex with hatred?... Oh, it’s perfackly—perfuckly—per-fect-ly All Right—per-fect-ly—... Start again: It’s perfectly okay to be homosexual—... Oh, sure. But your world, Neil—your world! Whew!” He stopped; he stared very long at Neil. The drunk hatred melts into an abject smile. “Your world, Neil, where sex and love—... Well—love—... Forgot what I was gonna say,” he said. “Oh, yes—but you know why Im Unhappy?” he repeated. “Because—” he said, enunciating slowly, “because—I—wanna—wanna—lover. Yes! A Lover! And all this—this motorcycle drag—it doesnt mean shit to me. I’d wear a woman’s silk nightie if it got me a Lover,” he said. Neil winced at the blasphemy, as if Carl’s remarks had physically wounded him. “Be careful, Carl! Youre talking to Me!” he said. “I know. The Saint.” Carl went on: “Yes, I wanna Lover,” he said, downing another glass of wine. “If he wants me to be a woman, I’ll be the greatest lady since Du Barry. I’ll be all things to One man!... I—am—lonely.” He turned drooping eyes toward me and sighed lonesomely: “Will you join me in a toast?” He lifted the glass of wine; and holding it toward Neil, he said: “To Saint Neil—from one of his—most—de—de—... Devoted—... Converts!”

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  We weren’t made to be alone with our thoughts. (Are you as happy as I am about that last one? What a terrifying place the mind can be.) We were made to reach out, to connect, to stay tethered. We were made to live together in the light. The apostle Paul beautifully described this way of living: If there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.8 He gave us clear direction on what this looks like in our interactions: Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.9 It’s a lot of togetherness, right? Several of my friends are counselors or therapists, and they all have confirmed the same thing: the prevalence of group therapy is on the rise because it works, even when little else does. It is not just comforting to have someone else in our corner; it’s scientifically proven to heal. 10 While studying the effects of stress on female behavior, UCLA researchers found that women seek out more social support during times of stress than men do. Other research has shown that having a strong social network can help people stay healthy.11 Yep. A tribe, a posse, a squad changes us even physically. We were built by a communal God for community. We need this! We need this, friend. Better Together God purposefully places us in community so that our friends can help us in the battle for our thought lives. When our mind maps are chaotic, our thoughts are spiraling, and our emotions are running the show, so often our escape plan involves simply reaching out, just whispering that little word “Help.” You and I need to be able to seek out wisdom and insight when our own brains can’t sort out the answers, can’t muster the willpower, can’t find the strength, can’t remember how to pray.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It’s our last morning. Erin, Mum and I are walking along Parsons Beach, bracing ourselves against the wind. It is a bitter, salt cold day; we tread on frozen sand. Strings of seaducks fly far offshore, ragged lines over soaked slate baize. The waters under them are full of lobsters; Maine is famous for them; signs for lobster rolls hang everywhere across town. Erin’s dad had been a lobsterman once, and I’d gone out fishing with them years ago. Which is to say, I sat on the deck of their boat and watched as they hauled traps, measured, sorted and banded lobsters, rebaited the traps and set them overboard. They worked for hours while I sat there, unable to help, unable to do anything except watch. They were delighted I’d come out with them, and it was a wonderful day, but I felt guilty all the same: I was an English tourist out of her depth. Walking on the beach I remembered that boat-trip and felt uncomfortable as hell. I’d spent months out with Mabel on the hill. I’d seen the harvest come in, tractors harrowing slopes, stockmen turning sheep out to winter in the fields. And I’d not spoken to anyone. No one at all. I thought of the summer tourists here standing in packs to photograph the lobster boats coming in, or angling their cameras to catch the twisted light and shade on stacks of lobster traps on Cape Porpoise quay. Was I like that? I hadn’t meant to be a tourist with my hawk. It didn’t feel like tourism. But I sure as hell had avoided being part of the working world. We turn back, walking into the wind now, crunching over ice-crusted rockweed and sending sanderling flocks swirling along the tideline. The off-season streets are deserted, the hotels closed, shutters down, wooden signboards swinging in the wind. A Cooper’s hawk sits on the overhead stop-light on the intersection of Main Street and Western Avenue, flat-headed and fluffed as Mabel, looking down on the empty town. Back at the inn, feeling cold and horribly sober, I grab a coffee and pace about by the fire. My face is burning. I suppose it is from the wind. Mum is packing upstairs. Erin and his dad are in the kitchen. I can hear them laughing. I don’t want to go back, I think. I had fled from community. At my father’s memorial I’d remembered it existed. Now I am back in it, in the middle of a community, in the middle of a family home, and I do not want to leave. This place is fixing my broken heart. I can feel it mending, and I’m fearful of what will happen when I’m gone. I’m not sure how I will cope back in England, back in my jobless, hopeless, lonely old town.

• From City of Night (1963)

  For the first time, he seems disturbed, deeply.... “And you see,” he continued after a pause, “because Im still hunting, I cant help feeling—or wanting to feel—that theres something in you beyond all the earlier words and rationalizations. I felt it in that bar, when you wanted to strip your own mask. You wanted to be known for something inside of you—beyond the pose, the ‘appearing’—the not-caring. You revealed yourself to be just as lonesome—... as lonesome... as I am.... And I sensed it,” he went on even more slowly, “when I heard you, just now, at last reaching for your own definition of...” and now curiously it was he who paused before he finished: “love.” Now he said quickly: “I’ll be leaving New Orleans, right after Mardi Gras.... Back to New York. If you want, you can come with me. We can even leave now, before the Carnival is over.” He paused very long. And this then is why the money lies there waiting. This is why with words he has tried to keep me here—successfully—while the Carnival rages outside like fire out of control. “I’ll help you,” he went on softly. “I’ll help you—in every way.... But it will involve giving of yourself. Loving back.... No,” he said (and was there resignation in the following words?), “maybe only accepting love, with the same intensity it’s given.” As a child, I was afraid of the dark, terrified the moment the lights went out. I felt somehow like that now. Afraid of a type of darkness that would loom, paradoxically, the brighter the lights were turned on. Before the impact of his words can throw me off balance, I challenged him deliberately, like someone who must make a life-directing choice immediately: “What would keep me from going with you and walking out right away?” “If you went with me, I’d take the chance that it wouldnt happen. I have a feeling I know you that well.” “And the others that Ive always needed—that I might need again?” I asked. “I’d count that eventually, with me, you wouldnt need them,” he answered. “And if it ends?” I asked—and suddenly I regretted that question, which already I was correcting: “And when it ends?” “It ends,” he finished. “It’s ended—... many times before.... But beyond that theres something else: which makes life livable: at the very least, the attempt itself—no matter how often repeated... or, even, merely the remembrance of that attempt to share— in sex and beyond sex.... I think that you could love me,” he said quickly. I looked at him very long, and Im not sure what I feel: Resentment at his words? Or a hint of a kind of balm on the loneliness?... A possible substitute for salvation.... I got up from the bed and I walked to the mirror in the bathroom.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And when I remember those lives—when I remember with longing and terror—when I wonder, in awe—will there be time enough? When I’ll be haunted by memories of those searching faces, will there be time enough for my own reality? I have merely breezed through other lives (like an emotionally uninvolved tourist! something accuses me as I remember all those I have fled from—but I reject the accusation), avoiding myself behind a mask as real as those which, now, soon, outside, in the streets, I will face. And is that why I—and others—have come to New Orleans, sensing the masked ritual of Shrove Tuesday?—is that why I sit here talking to this man, with his words turning lights into the darkest parts of me?... And my own reality? Behind my mask, the thin mask of compassion, eventually what? I felt a strange longing—a violent, unfocused craving, as if my heart were screaming.... What can be the meaning of this furious unhappiness? My God but Im lonely! I thought that suddenly, and I looked startled at this man in bed with me, and hes staring back as if he had in a secret way shared in the disturbing revery of other faces; the faces which we attempt unsuccessfully to erase with new ones: which continue to haunt us as if in judgment for nothing really given, nothing really shared.... The dark, dark city.... The city of night of the soul. And in that moment I realized in astonishment that, no, I was not a part of Jeremy’s dream. It was my own reality which he is bringing out. Feeling this—and feeling as if I were on trial and must prove something to him—I was able at last to speak now what had been lurking in my mind, nebulously, half-formed, as I had listened to his words: “Isnt it possible that wanting to be wanted... or ‘loved’... could be as much an aspect of what you call ‘love’ as actually loving back?” I said. “I mean, in choosing someone to ‘love’ you—to be loved by—while that other person chooses you to ‘love’—doesnt one complete the need of the other?”

• From City of Night (1963)

  Now Miss Destiny sat on the floor next to me. “You do know who Desdemona is!” Then again there was a long silence between us. Suddenly! Suddenly, and strangely—strangely then but not so now: now, inevitably and very clearly like this: Something was released inside Miss Destiny and something established between us in that moment by the simple fact of the mutual knowledge of Desdemona: that something released and that something established which she had yearned for with others from person to person in this locked world—and trying always futilely before, had given up. And of course too it was the liquor, and rejection earlier smashing at her stomach like a huge powerful fist—and the pills pushing-pulling in opposite directions, jarring her—the memory too of the Real girls with whom three of us had gone earlier—and this importantly: the loneliness churning beneath that gay façade desperately every awake moment shouting to be spoken, to be therefore shared: released by something as small as this, the common knowledge of the sad sad tale of Desdemona—or maybe more accurately than released: say, erupting out of the depths of her consciousness, aroused by the earlier rejection, resulting in that rare fleeting contact made rarely somehow like a match struck in the dark for a breathless sputtering instant.... And so now, because of Desdemona and all this meant to Miss Destiny, and all the things set off from the knowledge, Miss Destiny blurted suddenly frantically: “Oh, God! ... Sometimes when Im very high and sitting maybe at the 1-2-3, I imagine that an angel suddenly appears and stands on the balcony where the band is going—or maybe Im on Main Street or in Pershing Square—and the angel says, ‘All right, boys and girls, this is it, the world is ending, and Heaven or Hell will be to spend eternity just as you are now, in the same place among the same people— Forever!’ And hearing this, Im terrified and I know suddenly what that means—and I start to run but I cant run fast enough for the evil angel, he sees me and stops me and Im Caught....”

• From City of Night (1963)

  Wordlessly I get in. Wordlessly we make it.... The face of the man who took me to his house in Evanston (and it was here that I had stopped on my way to New York, here that I had felt the restless compulsive anarchy those afternoons walking by the lake with my friend, now gone), and afterwards I explored that lake by the University: The waves thrust themselves against the darkened beach. Pinpoints of cigarette lights reveal the standing forms. I make it there.... The face with swallowing eyes of the man who follows me out of the Cavern. “You dont have to do anything—just stand,” he says.... The faces of two youngmen I think at first are also hustling the park. One is a dancer. I score from both, separately, and the dancer gives me several telephone numbers. But I dont call them: The city—its streets, park, beach—invites me luringly.... The face of an oldish man in sandals—and he warns me against clipping him: “Thats so cheap!—so I must ask you: Please—dont—clip—me!”... The perspiring face of the man who takes me to an Italian fair, where we’re surrounded by dark faces. And he mops his brow and says: “Well, it’s all right to read about teeming humanity—but to be surrounded by it!”—as he pushes his way anxiously out of the fair.... The calculating face of the man I think I’ll score from easily; who says: “Youre asking too much. I always smile at you guys, when youre new in town and it’s still summer. I just wait for winter—then I can get anyone for hardly anything!...” And the sad face of the score who thanks me afterwards and sighs: “I guess I’ll never see you again. The nice ones just disappear—so quickly. It’s the mean ones (oh, I get so mad!) that keep coming back like we owe them a living!” The faces drinking beer at the place of a queen whos picked me up—faces there of three youngmen picked up by the queen’s roommate. And released by the beer, the scene turns into a melée of bodies.... And the others not now remembered. And that search to find some immediate redemptive something to expunge what was discovered in San Francisco took me to the mangled sights of Chicago’s hobo jungles. Madison Street. The enormous Kemper Insurance Building—a huge gray ugly building a block square along the river. Looming darkly. More than 40 stories high. A great bulwark, a fortress. A large square area windowless—Blind. Almost symbolically it turns its back arrogantly to the west side of Madison. Cross the bridge. And West Madison stretches in shabby tatters for blocks of leprous buildings.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Erin, Mum and I are walking along Parsons Beach, bracing ourselves against the wind. It is a bitter, salt cold day; we tread on frozen sand. Strings of seaducks fly far offshore, ragged lines over soaked slate baize. The waters under them are full of lobsters; Maine is famous for them; signs for lobster rolls hang everywhere across town. Erin’s dad had been a lobsterman once, and I’d gone out fishing with them years ago. Which is to say, I sat on the deck of their boat and watched as they hauled traps, measured, sorted and banded lobsters, rebaited the traps and set them overboard. They worked for hours while I sat there, unable to help, unable to do anything except watch. They were delighted I’d come out with them, and it was a wonderful day, but I felt guilty all the same: I was an English tourist out of her depth. Walking on the beach I remembered that boat-trip and felt uncomfortable as hell. I’d spent months out with Mabel on the hill. I’d seen the harvest come in, tractors harrowing slopes, stockmen turning sheep out to winter in the fields. And I’d not spoken to anyone. No one at all. I thought of the summer tourists here standing in packs to photograph the lobster boats coming in, or angling their cameras to catch the twisted light and shade on stacks of lobster traps on Cape Porpoise quay. Was I like that? I hadn’t meant to be a tourist with my hawk. It didn’t feel like tourism. But I sure as hell had avoided being part of the working world. We turn back, walking into the wind now, crunching over ice-crusted rockweed and sending sanderling flocks swirling along the tideline. The off-season streets are deserted, the hotels closed, shutters down, wooden signboards swinging in the wind. A Cooper’s hawk sits on the overhead stop-light on the intersection of Main Street and Western Avenue, flat-headed and fluffed as Mabel, looking down on the empty town. Back at the inn , feeling cold and horribly sober , I grab a coffee and pace about by the fire. My face is burning. I suppose it is from the wind. Mum is packing upstairs. Erin and his dad are in the kitchen. I can hear them laughing. I don’t want to go back , I think. I had fled from community. At my father’s memorial I’d remembered it existed. Now I am back in it, in the middle of a community, in the middle of a family home, and I do not want to leave. This place is fixing my broken heart. I can feel it mending, and I’m fearful of what will happen when I’m gone. I’m not sure how I will cope back in England, back in my jobless, hopeless, lonely old town. The back door slams. Jim is heading off in the truck to his workshop.

• From City of Night (1963)

  While it does, I must go on. “Yes,” he said, “as sure of it as you are.... Im sure youve thought you have a definite advantage of whatever kind over the people youve been with, because theyve wanted you, because theyve paid you —some sort of victory beyond the sex-experience, beyond the money. (But dont you need them just as badly?)... Anyway,” he continued quickly, “I’d say that when you leave, I’ll be less lonely than you. No, not because of the role Ive played (that can be infinitely lonely, too—perhaps lonelier— certainly lonelier); but merely because of that very rejection of those symbols. And it’s not just on your side that the symbols take over and create the elaborate guilt-ridden defenses: The ‘scores’ who brag about what the hustler did back, about how they screwed him. The hustlers who brag about how the score didnt even get to touch them—they clipped him. All the legendary defenses—to be used against that lonely, lonely feeling of the lack of love—on both sides.... An imitation of sharing.” I want to ask him why he paid me—why he went along with the one-sided sex—especially without my having asked for the money, especially because everything about him suggests desirability within that world. I feel certain now that he has purposely emphasized the giving of the money, given perhaps, at least in part, to underscore all these words—which he seems determined to speak, to me. Yet I can feel the gap between us broadening into a chasm as he attempts to come closer to me. Or is this his purpose?—does he want to broaden this gap? This scene.... This man’s words.... So completely incongruous before the Parade.... Still, I feel glued to this room as if all that is being spoken, while seeming incongruous, is somehow related to the ritual of the Carnival—mysteriously. And yet there are times when I cant tell how serious he is. Sometimes, when he speaks most gravely, he smiles immediately after, as if half-mocking himself, half-mocking me. “Anyway,” Jeremy had gone on, “all I meant when I said that I’d stopped running is that Im no longer afraid to give of myself.... On the other hand,” he added, looking at me directly, “Ive known people who have retreated into a symbolic mirror—in order to force themselves not to give.”

• From City of Night (1963)

  Now there was another figure on the beach—a shadow obviously pursuing the youngman in the white shorts. Soon, another lonesome figure appeared. The three formed a kind of strategic triangle on the sand—the focal point being the youngman in the white shorts. They disappeared toward the water.... In the light along the bridge as we walk to the car, the man looks much older. The wrinkles on his face are sharply etched—or perhaps I notice them for the first time. Still wordlessly, we got into the car. He drove a short distance, along the quiet park. Then, brakes screeching, he stopped the car suddenly. “Ive decided to go back tonight,” he said. “Where shall I leave you?” “I’ll stay here,” I said. He was looking intently into his hands, as he had done—only yesterday—when he had told me about his son. I opened the door, got out. Without a word—and before I could say anything to him—he drove off. But a distance of only a few feet away, he stopped the car sharply. And he waited there.... And with a knifing awareness I thought: Just as I paused outside of Dave’s door! Then the car, stopped only for those few decisive moments, roared away along the street. 3 When the inevitable happened (which had lurked in my mind, and which at the same time—I am now sure, looking back on it—I had thought to thwart through that very contact with Neil: although I was becoming aware of perhaps the most elaborate of seductions—or, rather, I would become aware of it in retrospect: a seduction, through ego and vanity, of the very soul), when that inevitable happened, it happened swiftly like this: I found Neil at home one late afternoon watching television: a western; the box set completely out of place in that bedroom suffused with the atmosphere of some dim past. I could tell that watching that program was such a ritual with him that I sat alone in the other room. Through the door, I could see him. He was dressed in full cowboy costume, replete with holster, gun.... As the sharp bang-bang! of the television villain’s gun burst from the screen, Neil drew his own and made a motion of firing back. When the program was over, we sat in the bedroom (he pushed the television set out of sight), drinking tea.... The manikins stared menacingly. Today, one was a military policeman; the other, whose costume I couldn’t make out, was somberly dressed in black. “We have a fine relationship, dont we?” Neil said. The statement surprised me. The several times I had been with him since that afternoon with Carl—only briefly for lunch or dinner—I had felt an even greater tension and self-consciousness than before—especially since lately he had begun to talk to me in almost fatherly tones. “Except,” he went on, “that you hold back. Why?