Sadness

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 Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  At the most he would give us a sort of weary, hopeless smile, a smile which faded instantly and left us with the spectacle of a life extinct. He was dead as a crater, dead beyond all hope of resurrection. And not even had he been given a new stomach, or a tough new intestinal tract, would it have been possible to restore him to life again. He had passed beyond the lure of champagne and oysters, beyond the need of light and space. He was like the dodo which buries its head in the sand and whistles out of its asshole. When he went to sleep in the Morris chair his lower jaw dropped like a hinge that has become unloosened; he had always been a good snorer but now he snored louder than ever, like a man who was in truth dead to the world. His snores, in fact, were very much like the death rattle, except that they were punctuated by an intermittent long drawn out whistling of the peanut stand variety. He seemed, when he snored, to be chopping the whole universe to bits so that we who succeeded him would have enough kindling wood to last a lifetime. It was the most horrible and fascinating snoring that I have ever listened to: it was stertorous and stentorian, morbid and grotesque; at times it was like an accordion collapsing, at other times like a frog croaking in the swamps; after a prolonged whistle there sometimes followed a frightful wheeze as if he were giving up the ghost, then it would settle back again into a regular rise and fall, a steady hollow chopping as though he stood stripped to the waist, with ax in hand, before the accumulated madness of all the bric-à-brac of this world. What gave these performances a slightly crazy quality was the mummy-like expression of the face in which the big blubber lips alone came to life; they were like the gills of a shark snoozing on the surface of the still ocean. Blissfully he snored away on the bosom of the deep, never disturbed by a dream or a draught, never fitful, never plagued by an unsatisfied desire; when he closed his eyes and collapsed, the light of the world went out and he was alone as before birth, a cosmos gnashing itself to bits. He sat there in his Morris chair as Jonah must have sat in the body of the whale, secure in the last refuge of a black hole, expecting nothing, desiring nothing, not dead but buried alive, swallowed whole and unscathed, the big blubber lips gently flapping with the flux and reflux of the white breath of emptiness. He was in the land of Nod searching for Cain and Abel but encountering no living soul, no word, no sign. He drove with the whale and scraped the icy black bottom; he covered furlongs at top speed, guided only by the fleecy manes of undersea beasts.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I am in this place around all the others like me, and though I keep trying not to feel sorry for myself, I want to cry. There is no shortcut around this thing. It is too soon to die even for a man who has died once already. I try to keep telling myself it is good to still be alive, to be back home. I remember thinking on the ambulance ride to the hospital that this was the Bronx, the place where Yankee Stadium was, where Mickey Mantle played. I think I realized then also that my feet would never touch the stadium grass, ever again; I would never play a game in that place. * * * The wards are filthy. The men in my room throw their breadcrumbs under the radiator to keep the rats from chewing on our numb legs during the nights. We tuck our bodies in with the sheets wrapped around us. There are never enough aides to go around on the wards, and constantly there is complaining by the men. The most severely injured are totally dependent on the aides to turn them. They suffer the most and break down with sores. These are the voices that can be heard screaming in the night for help that never comes. Urine bags are constantly overflowing onto the floors while the aides play poker on the toilet bowls in the enema room. The sheets are never changed enough and many of the men stink from not being properly bathed. It never makes any sense to us how the government can keep asking money for weapons and leave us lying in our own filth. Briggs throws his bread over the radiator. “There he goes again,” says Garcia. “That goddamn rat’s been there for the last two months.” Briggs keeps the rats in our room well fed. “It’s a lot better than having the bastards nibble at your toes during the night,” he says with a crazy laugh. The nurse comes in and Garcia is getting real excited. “I think I pissed in my pants again,” he cries. “Mrs. Waters, I think I pissed in my pants.” “Oh Garcia,” the pretty nurse scolds, “don’t say piss, say urine. Urine is much nicer.” Garcia tells her he is sorry and will call it urine from here on out. Willey is clicking his tongue again and the nurse goes over to see. “What do you want?” she says to Willey. He is the most wounded of us all. He has lost everything from the neck down. He has lost even more than me. He is just a head. The war has taken everything.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I broke down one night and called Helen. “I think I want to marry you,” I remember saying. “Are you sure?” I heard her say over and over on the phone. “Are you sure you want to marry me?” “Yeah,” I said. “I love you baby and I want to marry you.” Next thing I knew she was flying across the country with two screaming kids to meet my family. I met her at the airport. She was wearing red tights and I remember she had cut her hair. I’d really liked her hair long but when I went to the airport her hair was short and the kids looked terrible too. I didn’t know how to tell her about her hair. I remember she wanted to go to church that day to say a few prayers for something or other. I drove her over there but I wouldn’t go in. I sat in the car and turned up the radio. A song was playing called “Bye-Bye Miss American Pie” and I remember listening to it and feeling real sad inside, real low like I wanted to cry or kill someone. She came back into the car and we drove all over the neighborhood. I kept stopping and introducing her to people I knew. “Helen and I are getting married,” I said. I even introduced her to Castiglia, who was visiting his folks that weekend, pushing away from him in the wheelchair after I told him I was going to marry her. By the time we left Massapequa we were fighting about everything all the time and I was getting sick of the whole thing. She was always talking to me about going back to church and meeting married couples and building a strong family for the future. We hadn’t even been able to sleep together much. I’d had to stay on the couch on the porch and she was down in Sue’s room with the kids. My mother and dad never wanted a man and woman that weren’t married sleeping together even if the woman was divorced and had two kids. We tried living together for a while when we got back to California, first at my house and then at hers. I don’t know why I ever did it or why I ever asked her to marry me, but back then it seemed really important to have someone like Helen to hold on to. I even ended up going down to the V.A. hospital in Long Beach and seeing a marriage counselor for paralyzed men. The counselor and I sat out in the sun a lot and fed birds and shouted at each other but it never worked. Every time I came home from the sessions I threw up and finally I couldn’t even sleep near Helen anymore. I knew I had to be alone for a while. I found a small house on Hurricane Street in Santa Monica and moved into it.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I did my best to put them at ease, waving to them and smiling as I awkwardly struggled to keep my balance and not fall. I didn’t want them to feel sorry for me. As difficult and frustrating as it was for me each day, I chose to see it as a great physical challenge rather than a burden. Even back then I was trying hard to see things in a more positive light. I was still the great athlete striving to win the championship, to be my very best and make the Olympics and win a gold medal. And although I fell several times in my yard that summer, each time I was able to get myself back up and continue on. One afternoon, just as the summer was ending, I remember my mother peering through the dining room window with the saddest look on her face I had ever seen, as I once again struggled to drag myself around the yard. She had watched me try to walk in my braces many times before, encouraging me and telling me how proud she was, but on this afternoon she was no longer able to hide her sorrow. Years later, my mother would confide that seeing me for the first time attempting to walk with my braces in my backyard, occasionally losing my balance, falling and picking myself up, reminded her of Jesus Christ and the Stations of the Cross. I would try to smile, lifting one of my crutches above my head and shaking it in a show of triumph to let her know everything was okay, but my mother just kept staring at me, seeming as if she was about to cry. “What’s wrong, Mom?” I asked her when I got back into the house later that day, but all she could do was continue to look at me with those sad eyes, telling me how it hurt her to see me struggling each day, my body all twisted and atrophied, dragging myself exhausted around the yard. “It really hurts me to see you out there. It’s too much, Ronnie. It’s too much. Maybe the doctors were right. Maybe you should just accept the fact that you’ve got to be in a wheelchair. It’s not good for you. It’s too much of a strain on your heart. I watch you, Ronnie, and it hurts me. I love you, Ronnie. I just don’t want to see you suffer anymore.” I had hoped that my mother would continue to be encouraging and supportive of my attempt to walk again. Didn’t she and the others understand what I was trying to do? I tried not to let the neighbors’ uneasy stares and my mother’s sadness and doubts bother me, but by the end of that summer I was putting on the braces and dragging myself around the yard less and less, feeling depressed and spending more time getting drunk at Arthur’s Bar.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Magdalen’s voice was calm. “Mama, I’m calling from the bus station in Charleston. John and I had a fight. He broke my nose. Griffin and I are coming home.” She arrived at 4:30 in the morning. Virginia stood at the door in a flannel nightgown watching the taxi pull into the driveway. Magdalen emerged in the open-car-door light, a thin girl in a bulky army coat. The door shut and she became a slow, bundled figure kicking the driveway gravel with her shuffling steps. “Mom?” Her voice was sheepish and sweet. She carried one suitcase and a big shopping bag. Griffin had just started walking. He looked tired and wistful. His blond hair was much too long. John called the house, but they hung up on him. He threatened to come and get Magdalen, but Jarold said he’d kill him if he did. — Magdalen found a small apartment in town. She got a job at a flower shop. Virginia took care of Griffin during the day while Magdalen was at work. Griffin was a shy, pensive child who talked in bursts. He was precise, analytical and watchful. He made Virginia feel protective and sad. She tried hard to keep her sadness from showing. After a few months the florist let Magdalen take the flowers home so she could be with Griffin. On weekends Magdalen and Virginia went shopping for clothes or groceries. They were quiet and easy with each other. Magdalen lent Virginia books to read, and they talked about them. Virginia was surprised at how nice it was to be in Magdalen’s apartment. She liked to go there in the mornings with cherry-cheese pastry or fruit. Magdalen would be in the large, bare main room, sitting in her cotton robe on a floor pillow. The sun would come in through a big, curtainless window. There were white plastic buckets of roses, tulips, irises, freesia, dyed carnations, birds of paradise and wild magenta daisies. There were bunches of flowers on the floor on wet, unrolled newspaper. Stripped rose thorns lay on the paper like lost baby teeth. Magdalen’s movements were nimble and quick. Her face was serene and beautiful. She seemed completely content. Virginia felt as though she were a total stranger. — Virginia and Jarold became very quiet together. They still watched late-night movies, but they rarely sat cuddled together. Jarold got tired early and went upstairs to bed. He was always asleep when Virginia came up. Sometimes she thought Jarold looked obtuse and stupid. At breakfast, when he bent over the paper, he frowned so hard that his mouth pulled his entire face downward and he looked like a shark. His eyes were disapproving. His nose became blunt as a snout. She knew that he thought his children were failures. —

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  The commander and the heavy guy jumped back into the car and the boy could feel the warm spring air blowing on his face as they moved down Eddie’s block. The leaves on the trees had blossomed full. They glistened in the sun, covering the streets in patches of morning shadow. “You’re not going to believe this,” Eddie said to him, looking down at his legs. “I got hit by our own mortars.” He was almost laughing now. “It was on a night patrol. . . . And you?” he asked. “I got paralyzed from the chest down. I can’t move or feel anything.” He showed Eddie with his hand how far up he could not feel and then showed him the bag on the side of his leg. Usually he didn’t like telling people how bad he had been hurt, but for some reason it was different with Eddie. Eddie looked at the bag and shook his head, saying nothing. “Let me see your new legs,” he said to Eddie. Eddie pulled up his trousers, showing his new plastic legs. “You see,” he said, tapping them with his knuckles. He was very sarcastic. “As good as new.” * * * They got to the place where the march was to begin and he saw the cub scouts and the girl scouts, the marching bands, the fathers in their Legion caps and uniforms, the mothers from the Legion’s auxilliary, the pretty drum majorettes. The street was a sea of red, white, and blue. He remembered how he and all the rest of the kids on the block had put on their cub scout uniforms and marched every Memorial Day down these same streets. He remembered the hundreds of people lining the sidewalks, everyone standing and cheering and waving their small flags, his mother standing with the other mothers on the block shouting for him to keep in step. “There’s my Yankee Doodle boy!” he’d hear her shouting, and he’d feel embarrassed, pulling his cap over his eyes like he always did. There were scouts decorating the Cadillac now with red, white, and blue crepe paper and long paper banners that read WELCOME HOME RON KOVIC AND EDDIE DUGAN and SUPPORT OUR BOYS IN VIETNAM. There was a small sign, too, that read: OUR WOUNDED VIETNAM VETS . . . EDDIE DUGAN AND RON KOVIC. When the scouts were finished, the commander came running over to the car with a can of beer in his hand. “Let’s go!” he shouted, jumping back in with the heavy guy. They drove slowly through the crowd until they were all the way up in the front of the parade. He could hear the horns and drums behind him and he looked out and watched the pretty drum majorettes and clowns dancing in the street. He looked out onto the sidewalks where the people from his town had gathered just like when he was a kid. But it was different.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Again there was the gliding appearance of open expression. “She died a few years ago. Just a little while after I talked to you last.” Another threadlike connection stretched between them, but Connie wasn’t sure what it was. “That must’ve really been hard. I’m sorry.” Alice turned toward her, and Connie saw another face start to surface under the composed party expression, the careful eye makeup and poise. She wasn’t sure how to define it, but it looked like the face of a young girl who had spent a lot of time studying models in fashion magazines. “Yes, it was hard. You remember how things were. In a way I was relieved. But it was awful.” Somebody turned up the music and it marched between them. “How’re things with your parents?” “Better.” Connie nodded. “They’re back together and the separation seems to have cleared the air. They actually seem to love each other again.” “Yeah? That’s great.” Alice turned toward the table, grabbed a large potato chip and used it to shovel up a mouthful of green paste. Connie found a paper cup without anything sticky on the inside and poured vodka into it. She groped for a bright sticky carton of orange juice and a brief storm of conversation bore them apart; Connie became embroiled with a very young man who wanted to talk about the magazine she worked for, while Alice was impaled by the aquamarine stare of the peanut-eater Connie had avoided. They were relieved to come together again a few minutes later in an opposite corner of the room. “So Franklin tells me that you’re living with a woman now.” “Yeah.” Alice’s eyes brightened with a flare of enlightenment; she had never been able to understand Connie’s manic affairs or the way she had flatly turned down the men Alice would introduce her to, and now here was the simple explanation: Connie was gay. “Is that good?” “Yes, it is. I really love her.” “I’m glad to hear that.” “How’re things between you and Roger?” Alice looked away and shrugged. “Okay, I guess. We’re not that close these days. He’s seeing somebody else, actually. He’s off somewhere with her tonight, I think.” “Oh!” “It’s not a crisis. I think that it’s probably good for both of us. I’d be interested in an affair myself, but there’s nobody around at the moment. Roger has a lot of access to single girls. He’s gotten to be a pretty big deal, you know.” There was another shift in the surface of Alice’s face and Connie saw a sudden resemblance to the person she’d seen in the mirror yesterday, right after her dental appointment—one half of the face was alertly contemplating the world with expectation and confidence, while the other had fallen under the weight of it.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Though I was of the city too, still, when I visited my cousin Gene, I became aware of an even greater city, a city of New York proper in which my sophistication was negligible. Stanley knew no excursions from his own neighborhood, but Stanley had come from a strange land over the sea, Poland, and there was always between us the mark of the voyage. The fact that he spoke another tongue also increased our admiration for him. Each one was surrounded by a distinguishing aura, by a well-defined identity which was preserved inviolate. With the entrance into life these traits of difference fell away and we all became more or less alike and, of course, most unlike our own selves. And it is this loss of the peculiar self, of the perhaps unimportant individuality, which saddens me and makes the rye bread stand out glowingly. The wonderful sour rye went into the making of our individual selves; it was like the communion loaf in which all participate but from which each one receives only according to his peculiar state of grace. Now we are eating of the same bread, but without benefit of communion, without grace. We are eating to fill our bellies and our hearts are cold and empty. We are separate but not individual. There was another thing about the sour rye and that was that we often ate a raw onion with it. I remember standing with Stanley in the late afternoons, a sandwich in hand, in front of the veterinary’s which was just opposite my home. It always seemed to be late afternoon when Dr. McKinney elected to castrate a stallion, an operation which was done in public and which always gathered a small crowd. I remember the smell of the hot iron and the quivering of the horse’s legs, Dr. McKinney’s goatee, the taste of the raw onion and the smell of the sewer gas just behind us where they were laying in a new gas main. It was an olfactory performance through and through and, as Abélard so well describes it, practically painless. Not knowing the reason for the operation we used to hold long discussions afterwards which usually ended in a brawl. Nobody liked Dr. McKinney either; there was a smell of iodoform about him and of stale horse piss. Sometimes the gutter in front of his office was filled with blood and in the wintertime the blood froze into the ice and gave a strange look to his sidewalk. Now and then the big two-wheeled cart came, an open cart which smelled like the devil, and they whisked a dead horse into it. Rather it was hoisted in, the carcass, by a long chain which made a creaking noise like the dropping of an anchor. The smell of a bloated dead horse is a foul smell and our street was full of foul smells.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “I don’t like to talk about it here.” She opened her black leather bag to replace the lipstick. He glimpsed a roll of money and a packet of condoms in sky-blue tinfoil. “Why don’t you like to talk about it?” “It makes me unhappy.” The telephone by the bed rasped, indicating the end of their hour. — He saw her again the following night, and the night after that. He relished the way she laughed and playfully squeezed him around the stomach with her hefty thighs, or impatiently squiggled out from under him so they could change position. Her nonchalant reaction to his efforts to impress her sexually made him believe that her excitement, when it did occur, was real, that she wanted him. But if he so much as put a hand where she didn’t want it, she’d fiercely slap it away and snap, “I don’t like that.” “That’s why I like you so much,” he said. “You don’t let me get away with anything. You’re straightforward. Like my wife.” During that time, she told him that her real name was Jane. She still wouldn’t talk to him about her life outside the pale green room. Instead, she asked him questions about himself. He was too embarrassed by now to tell her that he’d lied about his job. The lie turned out to be a mistake. Not only was she unimpressed by his false attorneyhood, she was an animal lover. The longest conversation they ever had on a single subject was about a cat that she’d had for fifteen years, until the fat, asthmatic thing finally keeled over. “He had all black fur except for his paws and his throat patch. He looked like he was wearing a tuxedo with a white cravat and gloves, and he was more of a gentleman than any human being I’ve ever known. I saw him protect a female cat from a dog once.” The cute stories he could’ve told about all the kittens and puppies that came into his office, clinging to the shirts of their owners, the birds with broken wings in white-spattered boxes! — The fifth night he came to see her, she wasn’t sitting in the waiting room with the other girls. “Where’s Jane?” he asked the stretch-pants woman nervously. “Jane? You must mean Lisette. She’s busy right now,” she answered in her placid, salad-oily voice. “Would you like to see another lady?” A very young girl with burgundy hair smiled brightly at him. She was clutching a red patent-leather purse in purple-nailed hands. “I’ll wait for Lisette.” The stretch-pants woman widened her naked-lashed eyes in approval. “All right, Fred, just sit down and make yourself comfortable. Would you like something to drink?” She brought him a horribly flat, watered-down Scotch in a plastic cup. He held it, smiling and sweating.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Every time I became aware of him standing there I jibbed her a little for good measure and in her half sleep she answered back, humorously, as though she understood what I meant by this put-and-take language. I didn’t dare to think what she might be thinking or I’d have come immediately. Sometimes I skirted dangerously close to it, but the saving trick was always Monica and the corpse at the Grand Central Station. The thought of that, the humorousness of it, I mean, acted like a cold douche. When it was all over she opened her eyes wide and stared at me, as though she were taking me in for the first time. I hadn’t a word to say to her; the only thought in my head was to get out as quickly as possible. As we were washing up I noticed a note on the floor near the door. It was from Kronski. His wife had just been taken to the hospital—he wanted her to meet him at the hospital. I felt relieved! It meant that I could break away without wasting any words. The next day I had a telephone call from Kronski. His wife had died on the operating table. That evening I went home for dinner; we were still at the table when the bell rang. There was Kronski standing at the gate looking absolutely sunk. It was always difficult for me to offer words of condolence; with him it was absolutely impossible. I listened to my wife uttering her trite words of sympathy and I felt more than ever disgusted with her. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. We walked along in absolute silence for a while. At the park we turned in and headed for the meadows. There was a heavy mist which made it impossible to see a yard ahead. Suddenly, as we were swimming along, he began to sob. I stopped and turned my head away. When I thought he had finished I looked around and there he was staring at me with a strange smile. “It’s funny,” he said, “how hard it is to accept death.” I smiled too now and put my hand on his shoulder. “Go on,” I said, “talk your head off. Get it off your chest.” We started walking again, up and down over the meadows, as though we were walking under the sea. The mist had become so thick that I could just barely discern his features. He was talking quietly and madly. “I knew it would happen,” he said. “It was too beautiful to last.” The night before she was taken ill he had had a dream. He dreamt that he had lost his identity. “I was stumbling around in the dark calling my own name. I remember coming to a bridge, and looking down into the water I saw myself drowning. I jumped off the bridge head first and when I came up I saw Yetta floating under the bridge.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Joshua Ben-Kisma, leader of the so-called moderates, who had lamentably failed in his role of peacemaker, succumbed at about that time to the last stages of a long illness; he died calling down upon us foreign wars and victory for Parthia. On the other hand, the Christianized Jews, whom we had not disturbed and who harbored resentment against the rest of the Hebrews for having persecuted their prophet, saw in us the instrument of divine wrath. The long series of frenzies and misconceptions was thus continuing. An inscription placed on the site of Jerusalem forbade the Jews, under pain of death, to re-establish themselves anew upon that heap of rubble; it reproduced word for word the interdict formerly inscribed on the temple door, forbidding entrance to the uncircumcised. One day a year, on the ninth of the month of Ab, the Jews have the right to come to weep in front of a ruined wall. The most devout refused to leave their native land; they settled as well as they could in the regions least devastated by the war. The most fanatical emigrated to Parthian territory; others went to Antioch, to Alexandria, and to Pergamum; the clever ones made for Rome, where they prospered. Judaea was struck from the map and took the name of Palestine by my order. In those four years of war fifty fortresses and more than nine hundred villages and towns had been sacked and destroyed; the enemy had lost nearly six hundred thousand men; battles, endemic fevers, and epidemics had taken nearly ninety thousand of ours. The labors of war were followed immediately by reconstruction in that area; Aelia Capitolina was rebuilt, though on a more modest scale; one has always to begin over again. I rested for some time in Sidon, where a Greek merchant lent me his house and his gardens. In March those inner courts were already carpeted with roses. I had regained my strength, and was even discovering surprising resources in this body which at first had been prostrated by the violence of the initial attack. But we have understood nothing about illness so long as we have not recognized its odd resemblance to war and to love, its compromises, its feints, its exactions, that strange and unique amalgam produced by the mixture of a temperament and a malady. I was better, but in order to contrive with my body, to impose my wishes upon it or to cede prudently to its will, I devoted as much art as I had formerly employed in regulating and enlarging my world, in building the being who I am, and in embellishing my life. I resumed the exercises of the gymnasium, but with moderation; although my physician no longer forbade me the use of a horse, riding was now no more than a means of transport; I had to forego the dangerous jumps of other days.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I buried myself in my books, cutting myself off from the other students. It was as if they threatened me—particularly the activists, the radicals. I was sitting alone in my apartment listening to the radio when I first heard the news about Kent State. Four students had just been shot in a demonstration against the invasion of Cambodia. For a moment there was a shock through my body. I felt like crying. The last time I had felt that way was the day Kennedy was killed. I remember saying to myself, The whole thing is coming down now. I wheeled out to my car. I didn’t know where I was going but I had to find other people who felt the way I did. I drove down the street to the university. Students were congregating in small groups all over the place. The campus looked as if it were going to explode. Banners were going up and monitors with red armbands were walking up and down handing out leaflets. There was going to be a march and demonstration. I thought carefully for a moment or two, then decided to participate, driving my car past the hundreds of students marching down to the big parking lot where the rally was to be held. I honked my horn in support but I was still feeling a little hesitant. I stayed in my car all during the rally, listening intently to each speaker and cheering and shouting with the crowd. I was still acting like an observer. The last speaker was a woman who said there would be a huge rally in Washington that Saturday and that it was hoped that everyone would make it down. I decided I would go. That night I called my cousin Ginny’s husband Skip. He used to come and visit me at the hospital when I first came back and after I got out we became good friends. Sometimes we’d stay up all night at his house playing cards and talking about Vietnam and what had happened to me. Skip’s views were very different from mine back then. He was against the war. And each time I left his house to go home, he’d give me books to read—books about the black people and poor people of the country. I laughed at him at first and didn’t take the books too seriously, but it was lonely in my room and soon I began to read. And before long, every time I went to his house I asked for more books. Skip seemed surprised when I asked him to go to the rally with me but he said yes, and early Saturday morning we left for Washington. * * * The New Jersey Turnpike was packed with cars painted with flags and signs, and everywhere there were people hitching, holding up big cardboard peace symbols. You didn’t have to ask where anyone was going. We were all going to the same place.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  R. had stepped away as she spoke, turning his attention to the walls. She began to tell us about the paintings, glad to have an audience; she paused between sentences for me to translate, though I couldn’t always follow what she said. It was easy to tell apart the three artists as we scanned the walls: Her own paintings were swirling pale abstractions, her son’s glossy female nudes. Her husband’s work was larger and more striking, painted with the angular stylization of socialist-era art. Almost all of Sofia’s public art was in this style, which I liked, more or less, though my Bulgarian friends pursed their lips at my admiration. Mnogo sots, they would say, very socialist, not just about murals and monuments but about music, too, about movies and books, dismissing at a stroke whole generations. The largest of the paintings in the main room formed a series, each of them featuring a central figure with a lyre, his neck bent toward it as if playing for himself alone. That’s Orpheus, the woman said, do you know the story? I did, I had read Ovid in school, and when I said this her whole face lifted and lit up. How wonderful, she said, and then, he was from here, you know, he was Bulgarian, you can see his tomb in the south. I made a sound of polite interest, I had heard this before, and knew that for many people here the spiritual nation was still defined by its most expansive borders, Bulgaria na tri moreta, Bulgaria of the three seas, when for a brief moment it encompassed the whole of Thrace. I translated this too for R., and then, since he didn’t know the story, I sketched it for him: the wedding and the snake, the descent, the trees that uprooted themselves to dance, and then (though this wasn’t in the paintings) the Bacchantes, the slaughter, the head singing its way to Lesbos. We moved slowly, respectfully, through each of the rooms, and then, in the last, the woman directed us down a narrow staircase to a lower level. It was too steep for her, she said, not following us down, but take your time, look at whatever you like. The wooden planks made alarming noises as we descended, and I steadied myself against the wall; halfway down R. placed his hand on my shoulder, as if I were leading him through the dark. The basement was partitioned like the story above it, but it was unfinished; the floors were concrete, the space lit by bare bulbs hanging from wires. The walls here were crammed even more frantically with paintings, which were mounted haphazardly, wherever there was space, without any thought for coherence. In one room there was a heap of canvases stacked one on top of another, several columns of them piled almost to the ceiling, and I paused before them while R. explored the other rooms. This was where they put the paintings that didn’t sell, I supposed; they were displayed upstairs for a while and then moved here to make room. There were hundreds of them, enough for a life’s work, for several lives. It was a kind of trash heap, I thought, or might as well be; they would just sit there, gathering dust and mold, they would never be looked at again. They were buried here, along with the hours and days they had taken, the effort. We have an idea that the things we make will last, but they never do, or almost never; we make them and value them for a while and then they’re cleared away. There’s no metaphysics in it, I thought as I stood there staring at the heap of canvas and paint; it was like an automatic process, biological almost, a kind of excretion, there wasn’t any meaning in it, it laid no claim upon the future. And of course I thought of the pages I number and stack like those paintings, the things I have made, how arduous and ardent the effort, I thought, though I might as well have been counting stones as pages, I might as well have been stacking grains of sand. I repeated the words to myself, ardor and arduous, struck as I had been before by the false similarity between them; I rolled them around without intention, it hardly counts as thought, until as if by their own engendering there appeared among or against them a new word, ordure, the three words linked and tumbling, consequence and cause, until R. came up behind me and placed his hand on my neck, pulling my face toward his own.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  M., the chief surgeon at the hospital’s Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) Center, walks past me. He is very tired but still he recognizes me and says hello. He has been in the operating room all day. His first patient, a paraplegic from D ward, had to have a flap put on his rear end for a bedsore that wouldn’t heal. There are a lot of them in here with that problem and sometimes the flap doesn’t take and they have to do it all over again. It can be very frustrating. Dr. M.’s second patient was not as lucky and had to have his gangrenous left foot removed. The nurses did all they could to save the foot but in the end they just weren’t able to. There are a lot of paralyzed guys around here with amputated legs. You can get a really bad burn and not even know it. I remember hearing a story once about a guy who came home drunk one night with his girlfriend and she filled the bathtub and placed him in it, not realizing the water was scalding hot. He got burned really badly and died the following week. There are a lot of stories like that and you try to never forget them. These are important lessons, and as horrible as it may seem, remembering them is crucial to our survival. For nearly three months last year I was a patient here at the Long Beach VA hospital, healing a terrible bedsore on my rear end after a fall in the bathtub at my apartment. The accident happened not long after I had broken up with a woman named Carol who I first met at an antiwar demonstration in Los Angeles in the spring of 1972. Carol was the first woman I loved and the very first woman to break my heart. After we broke up I felt as if my whole world had fallen apart. I was depressed and hardly getting any sleep at night. I remember putting a bandage over the bruise but it just kept getting worse. After a while the bruise became a sore and the sore an open wound, until finally I had to turn myself in to the hospital. The last place I wanted to be was back in the Long Beach VA hospital. I hated the place. The conditions were atrocious, as bad if not worse than the Bronx VA in New York where I had been after I first came home from the war. The wards were overcrowded and terribly understaffed. The aides would sit in their little room at the end of the hall drinking coffee and cackling away as men on the wards cried out for help that never came. All the windows were tightly shut. The air was rancid, and I would push my call button again and again but no one would come to help.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  his arms go numb. It was so wonderful, so good, to see Tommy again. He seemed to bring back something wonderfully happy in his past and he didn’t want to let go. They held on to each other for a long time. And when Tommy finally pulled away, his face was bright red and covered with tears and pain. Tommy held his head with his hands still shaking, looking at him sitting there in disbelief. He looked up at Tommy’s face and he could see that he was very sad. The crowd had gathered now watching the two friends almost with curiosity. He tried wiping the tears from his eyes, still trying to laugh and make Tommy and himself and all the others feel more at ease, but Tommy would not smile and he kept holding his head. Still crying, he shook his head back and forth. And now, looking up at Tommy’s face, he could see the thin scar that ran along his hairline, the same kind of scar he’d seen on the heads of the vegetables who had had their brains blown out, where plates had been put in to replace part of the skull. But Tommy didn’t want to talk about what had happened to him. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. He grabbed the back handles of the chair and began pushing him through the crowd. He pushed him through the town past the Long Island Railroad station to the American Legion hall. They sat in the corner of the bar, watching the mayor and all the politicians. And Tommy tried to keep the drunken Legion members from hanging all over him and telling him their war stories. The tall commander, who was now very drunk, came over asking Tommy and him if they wanted a ride back home in the Cadillac. Tommy said they were walking home, and they left the American Legion hall and the drunks in the bar, with Tommy pushing his wheelchair, walking back through the town where they had grown up, past the baseball field at Parkside School where they had played as kids, back to Hamilton Avenue, where they sat together in front of Peter Weber’s house almost all night, still not believing they were together again.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Barbara was a jeweler who had never quite been able to become a big name in the industry, but whose work was a persistent presence in fashion magazines and department stores. She had recently separated from her husband of twelve years, a sculptor whom Susan had known. Barbara didn’t seem so much upset by the separation as appalled. “I can’t say that suddenly we didn’t know each other, or anything like that, because I actually know John very well. It isn’t even that we don’t love each other anymore, because I do love John, even if it’s more of a sisterly love at this point. People say that it gets that way after you’ve been married awhile.” She cut her salmon steak into pieces with polite, relaxed moves, as though pausing in a discussion of art or film. “Well, what is it, do you think?” asked Susan. Barbara sat back. “I’m not sure how to describe it. It was like everything that supported the relationship was coming from the outside. Judging by all the signs, we were a perfectly successful couple and John was an ideal husband for me—rich, blond, tall, sensitive, ad nauseam. But even worse, it seemed as if our most intimate conversations were based on what we were supposed to be saying, and what we were supposed to be. Nothing seemed to come directly from us. Do you know what I mean? I sound like a hippie, I know.” “No, I know what you mean.” “I don’t know. I didn’t see it that way at the time. He was just driving me crazy and I guess I was driving him crazy too.” “I don’t know anymore how much a relationship can be based on what comes from the inside,” said Susan. “With Steve and me, it’s all based on us, and it’s very genuine and very sweet but sometimes it seems as if we’re involved in a fantasy that has nothing to do with the real world. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that, I don’t know, but it can begin to feel solipsistic.” She remembered what her father had said to her during an argument when she was fifteen years old: “You want to suck people dry, you expect them to pour out their guts to you and you to them over and over and over until you know everything, and it just doesn’t work that way. Relationships are built from ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ and ‘I’m fine.’ ” He had said this last word like a stake was being driven through his heart. “Do you remember Leisha?” “I sure do. The nutty one with the musician boyfriend. Why?” “I thought I saw her on the street today.

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

  Nine months after that yes, on February 20, 1984, my mother checked into Hillbrow Hospital for a scheduled C-section delivery. Estranged from her family, pregnant by a man she could not be seen with in public, she was alone. The doctors took her up to the delivery room, cut open her belly, and reached in and pulled out a half-white, half-black child who violated any number of laws, statutes, and regulations—I was born a crime. Where most children are proof of their parents’ love, I was the proof of their criminality. The only time I could be with my father was indoors. If we left the house, he’d have to walk across the street from us. My mom and I used to go to Joubert Park all the time. It’s the Central Park of Johannesburg—beautiful gardens, a zoo, a giant chessboard with human-sized pieces that people would play. My mother tells me that once, when I was a toddler, my dad tried to go with us. We were in the park, he was walking a good bit away from us, and I ran after him, screaming, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” People started looking. He panicked and ran away. I thought it was a game and kept chasing him.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Menelaus, by contrast, marshals a highly conventional case against women, centered on their softness and artificiality. He extols the sharp, if brief, pleasures of loving boys, “whose very evanescence makes the pleasure so much greater.” He develops a contrast between feminine contrivance and the “naturalness” of male kisses. Unlike other “contests of the loves,” no winner is declared aboard the boat in the novel of Achilles. Nevertheless, the author’s position is implicit, both in the narrative placement of the contest and in the fate of the same-sex amours. The first two books are full of failed love, most notably Clitophon’s disastrous near-seduction of Leucippe, carried out under the advisement of Clinias. More revealing, both Clinias and Menelaus, the lovers of boys, experience the early death of their beloveds in tragic accidents for which they are indirectly responsible. In Leucippe and Clitophon, same-sex love can bring pleasure, but only mutual eros culminating in marriage receives the protection of the gods. Same-sex love is perishable, whereas the universe was built so that the rapturous delights of heterosexual aphrodisia would have a place. The love of boys, in the romance, was not sinful or abnormal, but it was transitory and tragic, for it had no happy resolution in a story destined to end with marriage.6 The ancient reader of Achilles Tatius would have noticed a conspicuous absence in the apology for pederasty. Nowhere do we find the soaring, spiritualized defense of an elevated form of mentorship that harnessed the power of erotic attraction for virtuous ends. In part the absence of any such defense is explained by the setting of the debate within an erotic novel, whose generic conventions accept and insist on the frankly sexual nature of human companionship. But in a deeper sense Leucippe and Clitophon is a cipher for attitudes toward pederasty in the Roman Empire. It is telling that Foucault sees pederasty in the novel as “episodic and marginal.” Central to Foucault’s presentation of Roman sexual culture is the claim that in the high empire, “reflection on the love of boys lost some of its intensity, its seriousness, its vitality.” The decline of pederasty, or at least its diminished place in the moral economy of sex, is treated as the counterpart of the conjugalization of pleasure. Foucault finds in the high empire a “philosophical disinvestment” from the institution of pederasty.7

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

  At a certain point, in order to try to save the garage, my mother quit her job at ICI and stepped in to help him run the workshop. She brought her office skills to the garage full-time and started keeping the books, making the schedule, balancing the accounts. And it was going well, until Abel started to feel like she was running his business. People started commenting on it as well. Clients were getting their cars on time, vendors were getting paid on time, and they would say, “Hey, Abie, this workshop is going so much better now that your wife has taken over.” That didn’t help. We lived in the workshop for close to a year, and then my mom had had enough. She was willing to help him, but not if he was going to drink all the profits. She had always been independent, self-sufficient, but she’d lost that part of herself at the mercy of someone else’s failed dream. At a certain point she said, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m out of this. I’m done.” She went out and got a job as a secretary with a real-estate developer, and somehow, between that and borrowing against whatever equity was left in Abel’s workshop, she was able to get us the house in Highlands North. We moved, the workshop was seized by Abel’s creditors, and that was the end of that. — Growing up I suffered no shortage of my mother’s old school, Old Testament discipline. She spared no rod and spoiled no child. With Andrew, she was different. He got spankings at first, but they tapered off and eventually went away. When I asked her why I got beatings and Andrew didn’t, she made a joke about it like she does with everything. “I beat you like that because you could take it,” she said. “I can’t hit your little brother the same way because he’s a skinny little stick. He’ll break. But you, God gave you that ass for whipping.” Even though she was kidding, I could tell that the reason she didn’t beat Andrew was because she’d had a genuine change of heart on the matter. It was a lesson she’d learned, oddly enough, from me.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  The anger and frustration would build up inside me and I remember several times screaming into my pillow as I lay on my gurney until I was exhausted. I felt so helpless, so lost. During the entire time, in that depressing place, Carol never called or came down to visit me once. I felt abandoned, betrayed, and soon stopped shaving and began to let my hair grow long. I remember looking in the mirror one morning thinking how much I resembled Jesus Christ hanging from the cross. I thought back again to the Bronx VA when I had been stuck in that chest cast for nearly six months after breaking my femur, and how as I had lain on a gurney on my stomach I would paint pictures of the crucifixion with myself as Christ, and how they’d sent the psychiatrist down from the psych ward because they were concerned and I immediately stopped painting, afraid they would have me committed just like my Uncle Paul who had been beaten to death in a mental hospital years before. The weeks and months in the Long Beach VA hospital passed, and I slowly began to adjust to my surroundings. Each morning the aides would lift me out of bed and place me on a gurney, stuffing a pillow under my chest to keep my testicles from squishing and my hips from getting red. They would do the same thing with my legs, placing another pillow under my kneecaps, making sure my bed bag was hooked up, then handing me my two wooden canes. Lying on the gurney on my stomach I’d push around the wards, then down to the cafeteria where I’d get something to eat. I would then go outside on the grass where I’d throw bits of crackers to the sparrows. This became a daily routine for me. In the weeks that followed I began to make new friends. Many, like myself, had been paralyzed in Vietnam, guys like Marty Stetson and Willy Jefferson, Woody and Nick, Danny Prince and Jake Jacobs, or Jafu as he liked to be called, who used to be a bodybuilder before he joined the marines. Jafu, I learned from Marty, was wounded in Operation Starlite on August 23, 1965, while participating in America’s first major offensive of the Vietnam War. He was shot in the chest, paralyzing him from his waist down. From what Marty told me, Jafu’s squad got caught in a horseshoe ambush, and though gravely wounded, Jafu continued to return fire with his M60 machine gun until reinforcements arrived. For this he was awarded a Silver Star and Purple Heart. Nick Enders shares a completely different story, though, telling me Jafu was actually paralyzed while on R&R in Hawaii. Some guy caught him sleeping with his wife and in a jealous rage threw him out of the sixth-floor window of his hotel room, paralyzing Jafu for life.