Longing

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 Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  It took an hour for me to clean the throw-up from the carpet. Trembling to my feet, I carried the bucket to the bathroom, threw out the contents and washed the bucket until not a smudge of grime was left before I put it away in the utility closet. After I showered, I felt a little better, but my stomach still felt hollow and sore. I walked alone to class, mentally pushing away the discomfort like I did during our mandatory runs when we were not allowed to stop and walk. It didn’t matter if my side cramped or my legs ached. I’d learned to tolerate the aches and pains of running, and now I forced myself to tolerate the effects of the flu through a whole day of school and physical education. I needed to somehow forget that I was sick. It will go away, I told myself. Months later a demonstrator took me to the little medical clinic on the property to cut out an earring embedded in my earlobe. I had not been able to remove the jewelry, so I’d left it in place and the skin had grown over it. Taking notice of the odd lump in my earlobe, the demonstrator called me over and probed it, her brows knitted. “What is that?” she muttered to herself. “My earring,” I said. “What?” She squeezed and pinched my lobe, her eyes squinted and lips compressed. “I couldn’t get it out,” I said. “Why didn’t you ask for help?” I shrugged, unable to articulate my lack of confidence in and distrust of the adults who cared for me. Although I missed Theresa deeply, I saw her only rarely, as was dictated. When I did see her, I lapsed into baby talk, trying to regain what I had lost. When I babbled, she would laugh, then ask me why I talked like a two-year-old. I didn’t know. I couldn’t explain, so I would bury my face in her chest, trying to breathe in her scent of fresh soap and the natural, vanilla-like fragrance of her skin. Once, when I visited her in her room, I asked, “Did you nurse me when I was a baby?” I knew the answer was yes, but I wanted to hear her affirm it. “Yes, I nursed you until you were six months old.” “Can I try it?” Theresa stood before me, her greenish eyes thoughtful. She sat on the edge of her bed and lifted her shirt to pull out her breast, still rounded and firm. I took hesitant steps toward her until I could reach out my hand and touch her. I knelt down and placed my tongue to her nipple. She sat very still. I looked up and our eyes locked for a moment. “Are you finished?” she asked. I nodded, and she tucked her breast back into her bra. When we didn’t visit, we wrote to each other often.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  For instance, I thought that all people in Africa still lived in ancient tribal bands and that people in some parts of England still traveled by horse and buggy and wore eighteenth-century clothes. My view of American family life was similarly skewed. Although I had spent the first six years of my life living outside the commune and I had clear memories of that time and had watched TV shows epitomizing contemporary culture, I somehow conjured in my mind a 1950s dynamic of American nuclear family living. In my imagination most women were housewives, creating domestic havens for their husbands and children, an idea I loved. I wanted nothing more than to live in a house with my mom, cooking alongside her and working on needlepoint projects during my free time. In my fantasy I was enrolled in a regular public school and had long, flowing hair. Synanon was a distant memory, a strange blip in the blissfully normal life that I imagined. My Synanon education lacked in other ways as well. I had no sense of geography and didn’t know where one country was in relation to another. I’m not sure I knew what a continent was, nor could I have pointed out California on a map had someone asked me to do so. I still struggled with telling time from a clock, and although I wrote and read incessantly, I had not learned even simple grammar. My ignorance of narration and punctuation in my writing led to pages of words all run together in one long, confusing string of events. After another month or two, the next wave of children came to join us on the Ranch compound. Having grown accustomed to the smaller group, thoughts of my other peers had dissolved into the recesses of my mind. For the most part, I did not miss them. Yet when they arrived, the second group merged seamlessly with the first. Within a few days it was as if we had never been split. One of the boys, Chris Waters, did not arrive with the second group, but showed up much later. Like the other children, I had not thought about him and was surprised when one day I stepped from the playroom and found him standing in the small courtyard between the play building and some of the dorms. He’d grown several inches and stood with his hands stuffed in his pockets. He seemed out of place. “Where have you been?” I asked, realizing for the first time that he had not been part of our group for some months. It startled me that I’d forgotten him so easily, even though I had never really liked him. He’d been one of the kids who’d liked to taunt me, but the mischievousness that usually lurked in his blue eyes was absent, replaced by a solemn and shadowy stare. “I was away,” he said. “Away where?” “Shh.” Chris grabbed my arm and pulled me farther from the entrance of the playroom.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  πόθησις, ἡ, -- πόθη, Ο. 1. 1988 b. A. 4, Schol. Il. 1. 240. ποθητικός, 7, dv, disposed to long for, Metop. ap. Stob. Io. 2. ποθητός, 7, dv, longed for, regretted, C.1. 1667. ποθητύς, vos, 7, poet. for πόθησις, Opp. C. 2.609. ποθήτωρ, Opos, 7, One who longs, Manetho 4. 120. πόθι ; interrog. Adv. (v. sub τόθι), poét. for mod; where? Od.1.170., Io. 325., 14. 187, etc.; rare in Trag., Soph, Tr. 98, Eur. Phoen. 1718; —c. gen., πόθι Nvoas; Id. Bacch. 556; π. φρενός ; Pind. O. Io (11). 7 2. for mot; whither? Ap. Rh. 1.242, Anth. P. 7. 566. B. ποθί, enclit. Adv., poét. for mov, anywhere or somewhere, 1]. το. 8, etc. ; εἴ π. Soph. Aj. 886. 2. of Time, αἴ κε π. Ζεὺς δῷσι if ever .., 1]. 1. 128., 6. 526: at length, Od. 1. 379. 3. also to give an ex- pression of indefiniteness, soever, haply, probably, Il. 14. 187., 19. 273, Od. 1. 348, etc. ποθ-ίερος, ov, Dor. for προσ--, dedicated, τοῦ θεοῦ to him, Inscrr. Delph. 29. ποθῖνός, ἡ, dv, poet. for ποθεινός, Anth. P. 7. 403, 467. ποθό-βλητος, ov, love-stricken, Anth. P. 6. 71., 9. 620, Nonn. Ὁ. , 225. πόθοδος, ἡ, Dor. for πρόσοδος, Decret. Byz. ap. Dem. 256. 7. ποθολκίς, ίδος, ἧ, Dor. for προσολκίς, a leading-rein, Hesych. ποθόρημι, Dor. for προσοράω.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  We lived on a ranch far from town, and if I wanted to leave the property, I had to have permission or be accompanied by a senior resident. I couldn’t even make a private phone call. What I mean is that we could leave, but it was a big deal to admit that you wanted to go. Usually, when people talked about wanting to quit the commune, there was a lot of persuasion to get them to stay, and they’d be subjected to more gaming. Community members would try to convince doubters that it was in their best interest to stay. Often people caved under that pressure, but there was another way: I could run away in the night. Runaways were called “splittees,” and a plan to split between two or more people was called a “contract,” which was what I ended up making with another woman and a man. Our plan was to leave in the middle of the night and walk to the nearest town, Marshall, and from there catch a bus to San Francisco. But it never happened because the other woman started to feel guilty, and she broke our contract during a game. After that, I was subjected to a series of teardown games and was told I wasn’t good enough for boot camp. Management sent me back to Oakland. I still wanted to leave and probably would have if I hadn’t met Barbara. Barbara was an older woman with some status in the community, and she took a special interest in me. When I first met her, she said, “Honey, I’ve got my eye on you and I’m going to make it my mission to get you to stay here. You have too much potential for us to lose you.” It was the first time since I’d come to Synanon that I felt somebody cared about me. I told Barbara how much I missed you and how hard it was for me being separated from my child. Barbara told me that if I worked hard and truly embraced the Synanon way that I would be reunited with you, and she promised to help me make that happen. The more vested in the community I became, the more unattractive the outside world began to look. Sometimes when we had games or seminars in which the subject of mainstream living was brought up and we discussed how it destroys people, I’d remember how vulnerable and helpless I felt when I was on my own. Those thoughts hardened my resolve in doing the good work and to finally bring you into the community. It was in Oakland, where I met most of the people who would become my closest friends throughout my time in the community and after. What really put a fire under me, though, was when I discovered the Kidsnatchers club, a kind of support group for parents working to bring their children into Synanon.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  Whenever I asked for something to drink, someone handed me 7Up, Coca-Cola or Kool-Aid. On the street where I lived with my uncle and aunt, an ice cream truck came rolling around in the late afternoon, with its colorful advertisements of chocolate-dipped ice cream cones and Hostess treats pasted on the body of the vehicle. The truck enjoyed a booming business, consistently swarmed by children and adults queuing up to buy the same items that were available in the market not far away. I usually bought either a Honeybunn, similar to a cinnamon roll without the cinnamon, or banana-flavored Now and Laters, hard, square, chewy candies that stuck to my teeth. Theresa had been fond of the pink-and-white Mother’s circus animal cookies, while my father was a fan of Winchell’s Donuts. At Grandma Regina’s there were usually homemade pies, cakes and cookies available at all times. An absolute favorite of mine was a store-bought white birthday cake with fancy, swirly, multi-colored frosting. I missed this frosted cake so much that I sometimes drooled over a picture of a mandrill baboon in a wildlife book that I had in my possession because much of the animal’s face was formed into colorful dips and ridges that reminded me of cake frosting. In Synanon, we used saccharine in place of white sugar, despite the artificial sweetener’s acrid aftertaste. When we weren’t eating eggs and toast for breakfast, we often had Grape Nuts. Some of the children sprinkled their cereal with the powder from the pink packets placed in containers on the tables, but I ate mine plain. Nor did I touch the saccharin-laced birthday cakes. Gazing upon these cakes only depressed me. Despite their delectable appearance, they tasted the way I imagined cake batter would taste if powdered cleanser were added to it. White sugar wasn’t the only condiment omitted from our diet. At one point salt, too, had been prohibited and replaced with fake salt, which attacked my taste buds like a tangy Alka-Seltzer with the fizz factor dialed down. I stayed away from the stuff, and when my desire for salt became overpowering, I broke off chunks of the large salt licks attached to the corral fences for the cattle, though we kids had been forbidden from doing this and other children who’d had the same idea had been punished for it. When I was sure I was alone, I’d break off a piece of the salt and suck on it until I puked, and then I would suck some more. With the ban on sugar lifted, adults immediately scheduled trips to the grocery store. Bags of doughnuts, Twinkies, cookies, cakes, chocolate bars and ice cream were purchased and handed freely to us children by the armload. Some of the kids who’d already made plans to leave the property for a brief trip into town collected money from the rest of us and made shopping lists of requested treats.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ποθέω, Od., Att.; Ep. inf. ποθήμεναι (as if from πόθημι) Od. 12. 110: —Ep. impf. πόθεον Il. 2. 726, etc. ; Ion. ποθέεσκον 1. 492 :—fut. ποθήσω Xen. Mem. 3. 11, 3, Oec. 8, 10, (ém-) Hdt. 5.93; but also ποθέσομαι, Lys. 114. 4, Plat. Phaedo 98 A :—aor. ἐπόθεσα, Ep. πόθεσα, inf. ποθέσαι Il. 15.219, Od. 2. 375., 4. 748 ; ἐπόθησα Plat. Meno 84 C, Xen. Hell. 5. 3, 20, etc.; the Mss. of Hdt. give both forms, 3. 36.,9.22; and ἐπόθεσα occurs in the Mss, of Isocr. 66 B, 385 E: pf. πεπόθηκα Anth. P. 11. 417, Sext. Emp., etc.:—Med., Soph. Tr. 103 (lyr.) :—Pass., aor. ἐποθήθην (mpo-) Galen: pf. πεπόθημαι Orph. H. 81, Or. Sib. 5. 261, etc. :— (πόθη, πόθος). To long for, yearn after (what is absent), to miss or regret (what is lost), Lat. desiderare, φθινύθεσκε... αὖθι μένων, ποθέ- ecke δ᾽ ἀὑὐτήν Te πόλεμόν τε 1]. 1. 492; πόθεόν γε μὲν ἀρχόν 2. 709; τοίην γὰρ κεφαλὴν ποθέω Od. 1. 343, εἴς. ; so in Pind. O. 6. 25, Hdt. 3. 36, and Att.; ποθεῖν ποθοῦντα τήνδε γῆν στρατὸν λέγεις ; Aesch. Ag. 545; ποθεῖς τὸν οὐ παρόντα Ar. Pl. 1127; αἱ κνῆμαι .. σου... τὰς πέδας π. Ib. 276; ἡ χώρα αὐτὴ τὸ μὴ ὃν ποθήσει the place itself will make us miss what is absent, Xen. Oec. 8, 10; π. τὰς ἐν τῇ νεότητι ἡδονάς Plat. Rep. 329 A:—Pass., Soph. Tr. 632, etc.; ὦ ποθουμένη (sc. Εἰρήνη) Ar. Pax 586; ποθεῖ καὶ ποθεῖται Plat. Phaedr. 255 Ὁ. 2. of things, to require, Ti yap ποθεῖ τράπεζα ; Eur. Fr. 470; ποθεῖ ἡ ἀπόκρισις ἐρώ- τήσιν τοιάνδε Plat. Symp. 204 Ὁ, cf. Prot. 352 A. II. c. inf. to be anxious to do, Eur. Hec. 1020, Antipho 137. 2, Xen. An. 6. 2,8; τὸ νοσοῦν ποθεῖ σε ξυμπαραστάτην λαβεῖν my sickness needs to take thee εν Soph. Ph. 675; dpa ἔτι ποθοῦμεν μὴ ἱκανῶς δεδεῖχθαι ; do we still complain that it has not been satisfactorily proved? Plat. Legg. 896 A, cf. Tim. 19 A, Andoc. Io. 2 :—Pass., ποθεῖται .. λεχθῆναι requires to be stated, Arist. Eth. N. 1. 7, 9. III. absol. to love with fond regret, οἱ δὲ ποθεῦντες ἐν ἄματι γηράσκουσι Theocr. 12. 2, cf. Luc. Imag. 22, etc. 2. in Soph. Tr. 196, τὸ ποθοῦν cannot be=70 ποθούμενον (as the Schol.), but it may be one’s desiring, one's longing, (cf. τὸ θέλον Ο. Ο. 1219; τὸ δεδιός, τὸ μελετῶν Thuc. 1. 36, 142); Herm. takes it as nom.=of ποθοῦντες. 3. as Dep. only in Soph. Tr. 103, ποθου- μένη φρήν the longing soul, cf. 632, Eust. Il. 806. 56. 09H, ἡ, = πόθος, fond desire for .. , ἐμεῖο ποθὴν ἀπεόντος ἔχουσιν 1]. 6. 362, cf. 14. 368, etc.; σῇ ποθῇ from longing after thee, 19. 321. 2. c. gen. rei, want of .., Od. 15. 514, 546. ποθήκω, Dor. for προσήκω, Orac. ap. Dem. 1072. 27, Anecd. Delph. 38. πόθημα, τό, -- πόθος, Hesych.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  The captain pushed the boy’s hand from his thigh. Gunner put his hand between his own legs. He leaned against the captain’s arm. There was a color polaroid of a woman one side of the wallet, one of a man on the other. Her hair was loose in a wind that had caused her the slightest squint. His was white, or very pale. The faces suggested age, or experience. But they were handsome, and strong. Perhaps it was the contrast to the pale hair—perhaps shadow and position—but the man’s eyes looked black. Gunner pushed his nose under the dark arm and nuzzled the hair. The captain stood. “I’m going on deck.” He reached for his pants. “Come on, Niger.” He shrugged into his shirt. He kicked at the dog, and his chain rang. Niger barked, then followed the captain to the door. He stopped once, frowned at the portal; then he saw Gunner. “On deck when you’re done.” Gunner sat on the bed, cross-legged. He ran his hand over the damp sheet. Let himself fall, to lay his cheek, roll his face and take the salty folds in his teeth. Elbow shaking, one hand worked in arcs. The other kneaded his belly. His lips kissed unvoiced exhortations. Closed lids and the loose hair shook with his fist. The cabin door closed. THE SCORPION’S LOG:I don’t know when I was born exact. Now I am captain of the Scorpion, a seventy-two foot diesel I have had six years—there was another Scorpion before that, went down on the Guatemalan coast. But I had money and friends in that port. I run gold, small arms, chink labor—they moaned and puked all over the forepeak hole, the engine room and the lazarette, fifty at a time, on this boat that is crowded with me, two children and a dog—and I have enough nets and fishing gear to run as a snapper boat on the North American coast. What I like most [The green, account-sized book is worn to the cardboard at the corners. The entries are scant and consist mainly of numbers—except this thickish, raddled section toward the middle. It is in the locker under the bunk, leaning against the wall.] is to read. That is my first enjoyment after the boat. At each port I try to get as many paperback books and magazines as possible. Spanish and English. I can read the French ones too, but slower. German I can only read enough for newspapers, speak enough for trade. But I have to tell something about what I am writing now first. We have been adrift two weeks. I tire of the children. They are nasty with me and each other. Gunner sleeps all day which is just as good. Kirsten reads as much as I do. I have all these pages in my log I don’t fill in anyway. This to pass time, then.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  ancient tribal bands and that people in some parts of England still traveled by horse and buggy and wore eighteenth-century clothes. My view of American family life was similarly skewed. Although I had spent the first six years of my life living outside the commune and I had clear memories of that time and had watched TV shows epitomizing contemporary culture, I somehow conjured in my mind a 1950s dynamic of American nuclear family living. In my imagination most women were housewives, creating domestic havens for their husbands and children, an idea I loved. I wanted nothing more than to live in a house with my mom, cooking alongside her and working on needlepoint projects during my free time. In my fantasy I was enrolled in a regular public school and had long, flowing hair. Synanon was a distant memory, a strange blip in the blissfully normal life that I imagined. My Synanon education lacked in other ways as well. I had no sense of geography and didn’t know where one country was in relation to another. I’m not sure I knew what a continent was, nor could I have pointed out California on a map had someone asked me to do so. I still struggled with telling time from a clock, and although I wrote and read incessantly, I had not learned even simple grammar. My ignorance of narration and punctuation in my writing led to pages of words all run together in one long, confusing string of events. After another month or two, the next wave of children came to join us on the Ranch compound. Having grown accustomed to the smaller group, thoughts of my other peers had dissolved into the recesses of my mind. For the most part, I did not miss them. Yet when they arrived, the second group merged seamlessly with the first. Within a few days it was as if we had never been split. One of the boys, Chris Waters, did not arrive with the second group, but showed up much later. Like the other children, I had not thought about him and was surprised when one day I stepped from the playroom and found him standing in the small courtyard between the play

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  3 Lackluster College Coed ...I had a friend who thought the secret was turning a turntable backwards. One pill made you stronger, one pill and you could fly. I had a friend who crashed us through a cornfield and all the husks could do was sing, but that was all right, it was singing that mattered to us, had weight, occupied space, in motion tended to stay in motion, in rest rest. You start with a darkness to move through but sometimes the darkness moves through you. —Dean Young, “Bright Window” When Mother and I had taken off for college, Daddy had stood on the back porch under the clothesline with the white cat slung over his shoulder like a baby he was burping, and he swore he’d come visit his first vacation. He said, Come Halloween, Pokey, at the latest. Old Pete’ll come walking up the road, making the rocks fly high. So stop that snubbing, you and your momma both. Make me wanna hork. He spoke these words out of his own wet face, wiped with the back of his rawboned hand, but it was all bullshit, his promise. I knew, and he knew I knew. Between us stood the tacit contract that come vacation time, old Red would need Daddy’s help nailing asbestos siding up at his camp, or our backyard fence would require mending, or so-and-so would be laid up and Daddy could use the overtime. He’d never set foot on this campus. His drinking schedule had become too inviolable. Plus, these college folks with whom I was hobnobbing wouldn’t know how to speak to a man who’d graduated grade six and spent days off cleaning his squirrel gun. In our household, I’d been assigned Daddy’s sidekick. Starting as a toddler, I’d kept a place standing beside him in his truck, and for the rest of his days, his lanky arm still reflexively extended itself at stop signs, as if to stop a smaller me from pitching through the windshield. But all through my drug- misty high school years, Daddy had floated through the house with an increasingly vacant stare, leaving a wake of Camel smoke. Over time, I followed the books Mother set down like so many bread crumbs to her side, and soon she was leaning in my doorway to hear Otis Redding or the sardonic Frank Zappa squawk. Once, she’d coiled my hair into a pinned twist that matched her own and we’d sat in an opera house half floodlit as a mournful soprano pined: Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore—I lived for life, I lived for love. That was Mother’s altar. Forget our scattered Sunday sorties into yoga and Christian Science. The theology Mother pored over—Buddhism mostly—was more theory than pursuit, and Lord knows why they baptized my sister, Lecia, Methodist. But I saw the shine in Mother’s eyes as that opera washed over her. Which music Daddy cared diddly for.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  eggs. I pushed them around and took a bite of toast, willing myself not to barf it up. The meal seemed to last forever. After breakfast we took another fairly long walk up a hill to the classrooms. My grade was in a room that seemed to favor the look of wooden desks and wooden chairs on a wood floor. Large picture windows without curtains displayed a gray morning sky. For our math lesson, we counted out small wooden cubes into groups of ten. Later there was a physical education class, which consisted mostly of one exercise, step-ups, that we performed until my legs ached and became numb. Afterward, we took showers again. Then we played the game, screaming at each other until dinner, followed bedtime at 8 p.m. Several days went by and my mother didn’t return. The demonstrators constantly reminded not to call her “Mom.” “Her name is Theresa,” I was told. “And don’t ask about her anymore.” B CHAPTER FOUR efore WHEN I STRETCH my mind back to the fragmented images of my early years before Synanon, I see my mom in snapshots, reading to me while I sit on her lap, her finger tracing the words, her long brown hair trailing across the pages. The paper emits a sweet, faintly musky smell, an odor that encapsulates comfort for me. She’s in the kitchen of our studio apartment, making cinnamon toast for breakfast and serving it on a napkin. My mother has something ephemeral, almost childlike, about her. A vein of vulnerability runs through her that even at age three I am able to intuit. For the most part, we were alone, the two of us adrift in the sea of humanity that makes up Los Angeles, isolated in our urban poverty. We moved often, from Hollywood to Long Beach to downtown. Once, when we’d settled into an apartment complex, a woman came to our door. “This is a family place,” she said. Her arms were folded, her hair straightened into a stiff, perfect, shiny helmet that framed her dark, self- righteous face. Her eyes told us that she was closer to God than we could ever be. “We don’t want you loose harlots and your bastard children here,”

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  At her feet was a puddle like glass run with slick rainbow. She was squinting at the sky. I was looking at her reflection run with colored oil and it began to rain, just like that. The reflection blistered. Just before it went completely, she looked down and the expression I saw (while I saw it I was wondering what was really on her face) was changed by the shaking water to something between scared and knowing as she watched herself breaking up. There. She was laughing and squinting with the rain down her cheeks when we looked up and saw each other. “Come in and have a drink,” she cried. We went inside and I thought she didn’t know. A year later, the day before I left New Orleans for good, I told Therese about that with the rain. With a bottle of bad brandy on the roof where I was sleeping that trip in, she was sitting like a ton of shadow on the edge of the roof and I was stretched on the mattress and just talking on and I told her and said, “You know what I mean?” like when you don’t think there’ll be an answer. But she stopped me and said, Yes, she did. I asked her if she really did. She said she did. I told her about the others. She said, a little smiling, she was sad she wasn’t the only one. We finished the brandy. Her boat she owned was the first Scorpion. Therese went off to Gulfport next morning and I took the boat. You want to know the next now. I took the boat to Spain and to France. You know it was easy? I thought it would be hard, and I wanted to do something hard and to see some of what Herr Bildungs had showed me. But it was easy, and I sailed in the Mediterranean a long time. You could haul tankers if you could speak languages and make friends. There’s always been more people liked me where I went than I liked. Which is pretty good. Over there too. It was the first white man I killed. I had killed two niggers before and the white man was in

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Yet at college, I never stopped expecting to find Daddy reborn beside me, showing me how to tie a slipknot, or run a hunting blade under a rabbit’s hide so the blue carcass could be disassembled and peppered and dredged in flour. And crossing the campus as leaves scratched along the sidewalks, I could sense whatever thinly stretched rubber bands on my back that once tethered me to Daddy had already snapped. How he’d taught me to talk—Y’all fixing to go to class?—busted up the average midwesterner. Even his voice on the dorm phone could draw a crowd. Kids who answered tended to ape the drawl I’d started to lose, mimicking Daddy, they sounded like cornpone hillbillies from Hee Haw. But I missed him enough to write a letter swearing fealty to the very self I was smothering: Dear Daddy: Thanks for the five-spot. You didn’t have to do that, since I have actual jobs making money. The food service feeds me like the little oinker I am. You’d just put your head under the milk spout and guzzle. I know you would. Thanks to all this chow, I’m weighing over a hundred again, so I’m less of a gimlet ass. There’s a really nice art history teacher named Armajani (he’s from Iran) who takes kids fishing on weekends at his cabin. He claims the bass are big as my arm. I told him in Texas we’d throw those little fellers back. I sure wish you were here to yank a few out of the water with me. I miss you more than black eyed peas, more than oysters. Your baby, Mary Without Daddy, the wide plain of Minnesota was a vast and empty canvas, me a flealike pin dot scurrying across. So I sought the favor of my all male professors, becoming the kind of puppyish suckup I’d hated in high school. Getting to class early, I shot my hand in the air. The white-haired psychology prof, Walt Mink, was a tall, barrel-chested man whose foreshortened leg, damaged from a drunk driver’s head-on, gave him a slightly heaving walk he never slowed down for. No doubt, a knack for tending the troubled—including the occasional too-many-mushrooms psychosis—kept him moving at that clip. Specializing in brain physiology, he kept labs full of pigeons and rats to teach conditioning theory in intro psych. In a sleep lab he sometimes ran, he wired kids up to a high-tech EEG. I’d signed up for his freshman seminar, Paradigms of Consciousness, under the delusion that consciousness was code for drugs—the sole subject in which I had a leg up. Early on, he spotted me pulling bobby socks on my hands after class. Having lost the leather mittens Daddy had bought me at GI surplus—stiff leather with Korean script on the inside tag—I’d taken to wearing footwear. He said, This another fashion trend I’ve let slide by? Chronic mitten loser, I told him.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Passing through the greenish neon of the station, I felt time curve back, and us in it. The place seemed coated with chicken grease. Even the pinball glass was smoky. A man sat on his shoeshine box listening to a big transistor radio with a coat-hanger antenna. In his raised-up chair was a thin lady with conked hair slicked alongside her head. Outside, Daddy threw my duffel into the truck bed. The door he opened groaned with rust, the hollow timbre of it tolling my arrival better than church bells. For five months, I’d ached to reenter a familiar slot alongside my fading daddy, but being there my mind went skittery as water flicked on a skillet. Even with the window open, the truck was redolent with Camel smoke and the goop Daddy used to clean oil off his hands with. There was a hint of cumin from a paper bag of corn-husk tamales from a roadside stand. And running under it all like current—what got him up in the morning and laid him out at night was the oak smell of wood barrels where whiskey soaked up flavor. For the first time in front of me, he drew a pint bottle from under his seat. He put the upended lid in the ashtray, and before he handed the bottle over, he drew out a corner of his shirttail to wipe the top with, saying, Want a swig? As a kid sitting on the bar, I’d sipped beer through the salted triangle of his aluminum can, but Daddy had so long and adamantly denied drinking every day that Mother had long since stopped asking. And he’d sure as hell never handed me any hard liquor. Daddy’s wink echoed our old conspiracy: me and him against Mother and Lecia, whose tightly guarded collusions were traded in whispers and giggles that he and I were meant to stay deaf to. The bottle gleamed in the air between us. I took the whiskey, planning a courtesy sip. But the aroma stopped me just as my tongue touched the glass mouth. The warm silk flowered in my mouth and down my gullet, after which a little blue flame of pleasure roared back up my spine. A poof of sequins went sparkling through my middle. As he went to screw the lid back on, my hand swung out of its own accord, and I said, Can I have another taste? That taste started me seeking out more hard liquor once I was back at school, though drugs were still easier to come by even than beer. I did okay at old Lackluster College—in no way a star, but neither the abject flop I’d figured on. Daddy carried my grade reports in his ancient wallet.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  Niger barked, then followed the captain to the door. He stopped once, frowned at the portal; then he saw Gunner. “On deck when you’re done.” Gunner sat on the bed, cross-legged. He ran his hand over the damp sheet. Let himself fall, to lay his cheek, roll his face and take the salty folds in his teeth. Elbow shaking, one hand worked in arcs. The other kneaded his belly. His lips kissed unvoiced exhortations. Closed lids and the loose hair shook with his fist. The cabin door closed. THE SCORPION’S LOG: I don’t know when I was born exact. Now I am captain of the Scorpion, a seventy-two foot diesel I have had six years—there was another Scorpion before that, went down on the Guatemalan coast. But I had money and friends in that port. I run gold, small arms, chink labor—they moaned and puked all over the forepeak hole, the engine room and the lazarette, fifty at a time, on this boat that is crowded with me, two children and a dog—and I have enough nets and fishing gear to run as a snapper boat on the North American coast. What I like most [The green, account-sized book is worn to the cardboard at the corners. The entries are scant and consist mainly of numbers—except this thickish, raddled section toward the middle. It is in the locker under the bunk, leaning against the wall.] is to read. That is my first enjoyment after the boat. At each port I try to get as many paperback books and magazines as possible. Spanish and English. I can read the French ones too, but slower. German I can only read enough for newspapers, speak enough for trade. But I have to tell something about what I am writing now first. We have been adrift two weeks. I tire of the children. They are nasty with me and each other. Gunner sleeps all day which is just as good. Kirsten reads as much as I do. I have all these pages in my log I don’t fill in anyway. This to pass time, then. It is liking to read makes me write. I do not like sea stories. I only read them in port. On warm nights I take the lamp on the back deck and read the science fiction stories the Americans write so well. They write about space. When I read them, I can look up into night and feel how it must feel to write about traveling between the stars because how I feel between ports. You read these stories, however, in this way, with this attention. The pictures form on the page, or out where the night stops, or when you close your eyes. Because it is something you have never seen, you must bring all your memories of touch, of taste, or what you have seen to make them. But you must be ready to let them break up and come back together different.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  His face and forearms were burned. Hair and eyes were light. “She was leaning up against the side and looking in. First running off, then coming back to look again. Say, Cap,” his hand dropped to thumbhook his pocket, “do you know this port well?” “Docked here this morning.” “Oh.” The man scraped his broad shoe toes on the asphalt before the captain’s great bare ones. “I was just wondering. You got these . . . women hanging all over your ship. You wouldn’t know how a guy goes about pickin’ up some pussy in this town, would you? They gotta keep it somewhere.” The captain grinned. “I guess they got to.” “I caught a ride up from Cugarsville yesterday. Spent last night in the fucking doorway over there, and, shit—” He plucked at his denim crotch, “I don’t usually have no trouble, but—” and looked up and down the docks “—you got that little blonde headed girl, and the other one who was lookin’ in your window.” He glanced at Kirsten, near the water. “I thought you might know where to go.” “Like I said . . .” and wouldn’t say more. The man wrinkled his face. “You ain’t from around here, are you? You West Indian or something? That earring and the way you talk.” “Been through the West Indies,” the captain said. “Now, hey! A whole bunch of nigger boys fish out this dock. Some of them real nice. Two already said I could work for them. But I’d like to get on a boat going someplace. I know boats fair. You don’t got no work for me on your boat, Captain?” “Maybe.” The man cocked his head in surprise. “Only maybe, though. What’s your name?” “Robin.” He grinned. “Robby is what they call me.” He plucked at his pants again: large hands on knobby wrists, on long, thin arms: but the muscles are sharply shaped. “I just come up from this damn small town. It held on to my ass twenty-four years. But not no more. Twenty-four years, and I decided there wasn’t noplace that wasn’t better than where I was. Nothing but odd job work. Our boats just fish the harbor. Some field work. And what all.” His frown came back. “Only, I guess it’s a little easier to get laid in a town where the girls know what you can do.” A weak grin; some of his teeth are broken. “Sit out in the sun and keep it warm, boy.” The captain grins back. “They’ll smell it when they come by.” Robby’s smile did not quite surface. He said, “I guess that’s about all I can do.” “Which way did the woman go?” “Down that street.” The captain turned back to the dog. The children ran up to him as he started across the street. “The lady—” Kirsten said as they reached him, “—is pretty.” Gunner had shown her the wallet. And Robby called, “Hey, thanks for the job offer . . .

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  When she speaks, I clutch the black receiver, for her voice conjures clipped lawns under maple trees, the easeful life of Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy—men in linen suits and women in billowy pastels, pitchers of lemonade on silver trays. I wasn’t entitled to any of that, of course, but the whiff of it lent me glancing courage. She says, Everybody had help. If one of them wouldn’t sleep, I’d let the nurse take the baby home till he got on a good schedule. Or, she says thoughtfully, I’d give them a little phenobarbital. Shortly before Mother takes off, she comes creaking up the stairs early one night with two bottles of beer and a frosted mug. They do not yet glow for I’ve been off the sauce for a year and am so besotted with Dev that drinking’s been forgotten. She pours the golden mixture down the side of the tilted glass, saying, This’ll help your milk let down. I say, I thought you were anti-booze. Even my religious cousin Delores, she says, drank beer when she was nursing. She actually had to pinch her nose to get it down. The fizzy sip tastes of roasted grain, tidy fields waving in wind. By the second or third sip, I remember the slosh of lake water against a boat Daddy had rented, how I sipped from a metal can of Lone Star while he picked through lures alongside me. Thus starts—for healing purposes, of course—my daily beer or two. Within weeks, I stop breastfeeding, partly because I know three or four or five beers could affect Dev’s milk supply. Warren’s at school, so he must miss these escalating beer guzzles. And that’s how—in some cosmic accounting of our family’s rampant dipsomania—Mother’s recovery dovetailed with the start of my own years’ long binge, for from that day forward, I drank in increasing amounts, as if our gene pool owed the universe at least one worthless drunk at a time. 17No Mom Is an IslandI was always waiting, always there. Know anyone else who can say that. —Franz Wright, “Alcohol” Through the baby monitor comes a single raspy cough. It barely pierces the heavy sleep that wraps my skull in sodden layers of papier-mâché. Static follows, then a tinny whimper. I fold one pillow over my head. Another gets tucked in my concavities. The husband’s long body unrolls. The white noise machine he’s installed to block out all disturbance makes the brain-sucking racket of a dentist’s drain. It vacuums all consciousness from my head. Sleep. Till a doubled cough punctures my head like two shots from a nail gun. I blink my eyes open to the room, immaculately black as he likes it, but for the faint luminosity of the upraised clock hands (2:50) and the tiny red snake eye of the monitor. I fix on it to stop my mind’s inward roiling vertigo an instant—a marble looping around a barrel.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  As I wrote that paragraph, I decided on an experiment. In an earlier chapter I mentioned Angela’s Ashes , Frank McCourt’s memoir of his Irish childhood, a book that relocates Yeats’s line “a terrible beauty is born” from the national to the individual level. McCourt, who grew up in destitution, writes about difficult circumstances in language that soars the spirit and sears the conscience. I opened the book at random seven times in a row, and somewhere on those facing pages there was always something about food. I stopped after seven checks, but you can try it for yourself to see how well it works. If I had written a childhood memoir, food would not have been a theme of such recurring inevitability. If it were there at all, it would probably be about getting too much special stuff this or that time rather than about not getting enough basic stuff all the time. But then I did not grow up hungry. Meal as actuality or meal as metaphor cannot resonate the same for two such disparate life experiences. The eucharist-as-meal or heaven-as-banquet falls a little flat for those who have always been well fed. What does messianic banquet mean for us, not as messianic but as banquet? If you surveyed North American images of heaven, how many would emphasize food and drink—enough or more than enough of it—as a primary metaphor? If I think about a meal, I do not think, Good, there will be enough for me to eat. If I think about a banquet, I do not think, Good, there will be more than enough for me to eat. In the latter case—banquet rather than meal—I probably think not of food but of dress. Is a business suit acceptable, or is a tuxedo required? Is it ordinary tie or black tie? In Chapters 23 and 24, therefore, those of us who have always been well nourished must walk carefully. We must, first of all, take that epigraph very seriously. We must, second, keep together flesh and spirit, body and soul, religion and politics, theology and economics. God’s Law always embraces those dichotomies together; for example, food is about justice and justice is about God. The kingdom of God is about food and drink—that is, about divine justice for material bodies here on material earth. We do not live by bread alone. But bread is never alone. CHAPTER 23THE COMMON MEAL TRADITIONPaul’s calling must be dated in the year 35 C.E. , perhaps even two or three years earlier. There are compelling reasons to give a very early date to the Christianity that Paul knew, when he was called as a missionary, and whose traditions and rites he accepted and faithfully continued. These traditions are the primary evidence for the earliest churches, while many features derived from the canonical gospels that one is accustomed to ascribe to the early Palestinian Christianity probably had not even come into existence at the time of Paul’s call….

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  43 The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Late have I loved you, O Beauty, so ancient and so new, late have I loved you. For behold you were within me, and I outside; and I sought you outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things which you have made. You were with me, and I was not with you. I was kept from you by those things, yet had they not been in you, they would not have been at all. You called and cried to me to break open my deafness and you sent forth your beams and you shone upon me and chased away my blindness. You breathed fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and now do pant for you … —St. Augustine, City of God A fter ten months praying in a cave in Manresa, St. Ignatius received a vision that permitted him to see God in all things —the stated goal of his Spiritual Exercises, which are part of each Jesuit’s novitiate. This doesn’t innately appeal to me. Despite my conversion, I don’t much care to see God in all things. I prefer to find God in circumstances I think up in advance, at home in my spare time—circumstances God will fulfill for me like a gumball machine when I put the penny of my prayer into it . It’s not virtue that leads me to the Exercises but pain. Only a flamethrower on my ass ever drives me to knock-knock-knock on heaven’s door. Pain, in my case, is the sole stimulus for righteous action. After six years in Syracuse—Dev’s eleven—I lost a love; or more accurately, I drove one away with a stick. It seems unfair to drag him in kicking and screaming for the purposes of this narrative, so here’s the short version. On tour in London, I’d taken up with a tall Cambridge-educated Brit met through work. (Let’s say his job was in TV.) Our months-long transatlantic affair had a glittery aspect. He owned more tuxedos than a maître d’, and I jetted over for his black-tie soirees. He spent a summer month in green Syracuse with Dev and me. But the distance was a misery. He ran a company in London, and I could never move Dev from his dad. Still, the Brit and I wound up engaged—as in to be married. He’d leave London for Syracuse and consulting. For a few months I deluded myself that my old dream of family was assembling. I splurged on fancy barrister bookcases for his five thousand, first-edition books, which arrived in duct-taped bubble wrap. I cooked steamship roasts. But Syracuse was drearier than London, with exactly zero tuxedo-specific events beyond the occasional prom. Plus an underemployed thirty-something bachelor with time on his hands wasn’t exactly a couture fit for a fortysomething workaholic with a six-foot son who giggled while chucking a basketball at said bachelor’s crotch.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Even at school I had felt stirred whenever I got a glimpse of the miserable home surroundings of some of my schoolfellows and compared them with the absolutely ideal conditions in which we children of the parsonage at Günsbach lived…. I could not help thinking continually of others who were denied that happiness by their material circumstances or their health. Then one brilliant summer morning at Günsbach, during the Whitsuntide holidays—it was in 1896—there came to me, as I awoke, the thought that I must not accept this happiness as a matter of course, but must give something in return for it…. I would consider myself justified in living till I was thirty for science and art, in order to devote myself from that time forward to the direct service of humanity. Many a time already had I tried to settle what meaning lay hidden for me in the saying of Jesus! ‘Whosoever would save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the Gospels shall save it.’ Now the answer was found. In addition to the outward, I now had inward happiness” (1933:102–103). His first thought was “some activity in Europe,” and he worked there for a time, educating “abandoned or neglected children” and helping “tramps and discharged prisoners” (1933:103–104). This social work, which he did in conjunction with scholarly research, did not surprise anyone. What his friends found somewhat scandalous, as he admitted above, was giving up theological investigation for medical study and Europe for Africa. Schweitzer’s own life warns us that his apocalyptic eschatology may not be as simple as we think. He summarized Jesus’ message, in one of the quotations above, as announcing the arrival of the kingdom of God, “that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a dose” (1969:370). I take that to mean the end of the space-time universe. After that consummation, only some sort of heaven or hell could be imagined. No life on this earth, however ideal or utopian, could be proclaimed by such a vision. We have, if I understand Schweitzer’s Jesus correctly, not heaven on earth but earth in heaven. But Schweitzer, having described Jesus’ vision as flatly wrong, offered us the first epigraph above, that famous closure to his book on the search for the historical Jesus. Those words, however, are only words—powerful and beautiful words, to be sure, but still just magnificent crescendo to a magnificent book But we also know what Schweitzer had intended to do for a full decade before he ever wrote those words—what he ultimately did do. He did not leave Christianity because Jesus was wrong; he left Europe because Jesus was right. And, in case we might miss the point, he reminds us in his autobiography that he left home “on Good Friday 1913” (1933:210).

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  The summer it’s done, I fly her up to Syracuse. Right off, she drops her purse in the hall and falls on the manuscript like a harpie. No, she doesn’t want to come to the park with Dev and me. She waves us on. I’m not going anywhere, she says. She takes up a lounge chair in the backyard with pages in her lap while I obsessively assemble cold soups and dips and marinades for the grill nearby, trying not to vulch over her. What am I waiting for? Given that she takes in books the way a junkie shoots dope, I want it to mesmerize her, which—since she’s its subject—is pretty much a slam dunk. I’m also hoping she’ll confirm in detail what she’s agreed in broad stroke is true. But there’s something more ineffable at stake, winding like thin smoke through me, unnamed. It’s as if—through the writing—I’ve assembled some miniature replica of myself as a girl, and she’s now being lowered onto Mother’s lap to be verified somehow. For all the schisms in my upbringing, the most savage scars didn’t come from pain. Pain has belief in it. Pain is required, Patti likes to say; suffering is optional. What used to hurt was the vast and wondering doubt that could spread inside me like a desert, the niggling suspicion that none of the hard parts even happened. So the characters that so vividly inhabited me were phantasms, any residual hurt my own warped concoction. I wanted Mother to see the girl I was—the girls Lecia and I were, really—to take us into her body as we’ve taken her so indelibly into ours. Is that love or need? As Mother reads, I grind beans to brew her coffee. I cut her sandwich into quarters. I keep wiping her ashtray clean. I dissolve sugar into tea and shave ice into a frosted glass. Occasionally, she hollers out, How’d you ever remember all this crazy crap? She laughs a lot. Once she says, This is your daddy to a T. I can smell him. But her strongest emotion seems to be for an alligator belt of hers I wrote about, which she mists up over, saying, I wonder where that went to? She absorbs the material—maybe as she did being our mother—as if it were a novel she’d already seen the film of, though like any mother, she’s inclined to heap on undiluted praise. No more convincing cheerleader ever shook a pom-pom. She’s almost to the end when she claims her eyes are tired. From downstairs that night, I hear small noises from the bathroom—stifled, intermittent squeaks like a mouse might make. I tap on the door, which opens to her red-rimmed eyes. You are so busted, I say. She has on a black T-shirt and yoga pants. You caught me, she says, wiping her nose. I didn’t mean to hurt you, Mother, I say. She looks surprised: I’m not the least bit hurt, she says. You’re not festive.