Shame

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.

Page 107 of 267 · 20 per page

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  He went back for the skirt. On his knees, he tried to buckle the heavy, hobbled belt. He began to nip her buttocks, stick his tongue into the wet crease, going lower to cover his nose in her smell. She turned sharply, brought her knee against his face. He fell back. “Filthy, stupid beast . . .” whispered, “. . . bring me your collar.” He brought the buckled strip of brass-studded leather. In the middle, a brass loop fastened to a plate fixed to the band. For the leash. He gave it to her. And she smiled, turning it around. Turning it. He breathed hard, slowly moving his hand over his hard-on. “Pussy . . .” he whispered. “Pussy . . . mama . . . pussy . . .” He reached for the little hair that was showing below the skirt. She pushed his hand away, still examining the strap. Suddenly he pushed forward, grabbed her around the shoulders, grunting. She beat at his chest, slapped the collar across his face: he mumbled, “Fuck-a-pussy . . . fuck-a-mama . . .” over bruised lips. He sank his red pole into her foaming slash. (But slashes don’t foam. Sometimes . . . sometimes? No. Sometimes everything . . .) She scratched his face, bit, spat at him. He brought her down, hard on the floor, so she cried out. Her leather grip raked his face, flailed his shoulders. Her thigh boots (he has only put one on her; she is wearing two now; and one glove.) flopped about his hips. He fell, hunching and hunching. She snarled and the sound opened to a roar; as he bit on her chest, he felt the strap go around his neck. “Dirty, smelly pig . . .” The buckle tinkles; the strap tightens across his windpipe. The buckle clicked closed. “Be quick, you filthy, stupid . . .” she whispers, at last. “We must be—” His cock caused her to cramp as her hand flailed. She hit the bottom of the painting. It crashes on its face. “—be ready for Proctor!” The sudden sound made Bull come. Perhaps in the painting she is only wearing one boot. And one glove. It is lying on its face. I cannot see. Proctor slapped Benny’s brown buttocks. “Pull your pecker out of that pussy. I need you.” Benny, groggy, pushed himself from Kirsten, rose unsteadily to his feet, bent to pull his pants up. It stuck out, all shiny. With heavy hands, he twisted at himself as he followed his master. The captain kneeled beside the girl. “Get up.” Groggy as Benny, she put her arms around the captain’s leg. The captain put his arm under her shoulder to support her. A black fisherman stepped over the near couple, stooped down and touched her right breast. “Hey,” at the captain, “how about lettin’ big Sambo at that cunt for a while, Captain? Sure would like some.”

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  In another part of the city, the longer hand on the church clock, in three starts, lurched a minute nearer midnight. Niger lolloped and high-legged it through the streets, pausing at a studio door, at the center of the city square, at a barred cellar window, to howl the season’s turning. A flash detonates all the combustible night. BULL, RETURNED:Anything? How about you want to suck on my dick. Shit, I can come ten or twelve times in a night, if I want. Last one was number nine. (He leans against the rocking cabin wall, hands in his pockets. Sometimes he moves his arm to brush Gunner’s. He stares directly in front of him and tries to make it seem as though it is the boat’s sway. On the rug, a hand flexes, is locked by another, is pulled back among heaving bodies. Gunner stares at the light points on the studs in Bull’s collar, the rigid flesh of the dark elbow, the reflections on the sweat under tangled belly hair.) You like piss, hey? Nazi told me you like to drink a guy’s piss. You know what I like: When I get all ready to come, say when maybe some little kid is sucking on my dick, I start to pee. It’s just like coming, only for a whole minute, you know? Mostly I just do it when I jerk off. I mean, I’d really like to do that. Yeah? Get down there, yeah! Like to have you around for a while, boy. You can take almost as much as I got to give. (Gunner has crouched down. Bull has one hand on Gunner’s shoulder. The other fumbles his fly.) Okay, now come on and do it. Use your teeth . . . harder, yeah, like that. Oh, yeah, fine. You’re doing real fine. SEVENHARBOR OF THE SCORPIONBut Doctor Faustus within short time after he had obtained his degree fell into such fantasies and deep cogitations that he was marked of many, and of the most part of the students was called the Speculator. —The Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faust (1592) THE SCORPION’s log:Perhaps this is a bad book. If there are bad things in this book then I should throw it in the water because I was afraid of what was on his face and because I was surprised and scared—I wasn’t surprised at Bull in fact I guess I’m glad—because I didn’t feel sorry for him at all. I didn’t feel sorry for him. And it would be too much trouble to have write this down then to tear it up. Or hire him.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Before Warren got there, Dev was Superman, and I was a distinctly unwondrous Wonder Woman.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Warren opens his wallet and draws out the twenty, handing it over like a radioactive item with tongs. The mild unease I expected is (did I imagine this?) the scrutiny a thief draws. Since our romance started, I’ve gone months devoid of shame, maybe even deceiving myself that I’ve been cleansed of it, till its icy bucket dumps over me from scalp to foot soles. Outside, we walk a cobbled sidewalk toward his car, the snow spatting on the hood of my parka. Along the curving streets of Cambridge, the silence carries us past the tightly clipped hedges. The colonial houses in white and canary yellow and smoky blue with lacquered black shutters are like magazine houses—clean places I want to disappear into the safe bricks of. When I can’t bear the weight of Warren’s silence anymore, I burst out with, What’s the big deal? I’ll pay you tomorrow. He shushes me and looks around. I tug his sleeve so he faces me, but he’s looking over my head for spectators. I say, Who’ll hear us? It’s an empty street. He takes his arm from me and walks on. At the car door, he says, My cousin owns that restaurant. Which I’d forgotten. Nothing deflates a righteous drunk like the pinprick of reality. The air rushes out of me as I climb in the car. He buckles in, and I remind him the cousin doesn’t even know I worked there. The job came through a college pal on the waitstaff. Warren cranks up. Sitting alongside him, I sense that his finger is fixed to some invisible eject button about to vault me from his side. If I close my eyes, I can almost feel myself spinning away, growing smaller and smaller. I shrink like a spider on a coal. The snow spits on the windows and slides off. Warren’s gloveless fingers, so long and finely shaped, grip the wheel. What I did, I don’t exactly know. Maybe I reached for his hand. Maybe I gave him shit for being conventional. My methods for clinging to him were varied and pitiful. Eventually, I needed him badly enough that I said whatever I had to, push him away. Counterphobic, a shrink once called it, meaning I run fast toward any event I suspect might be excruciating. I’m not preppie enough for you, I say. His silence holds as we drive. I amplify my rhetoric and volume. Maybe I should be wearing a kilt with a fucking gold safety pin, I say. He parks the car outside our apartment. As he’s locking up, he says—color blazing high on his flared cheekbones—And you quit your job. With your school loans and your father sick. Are you crazy? This is a buzzword with me, since deep down I know I’m crazy, my chief fear being that everybody’ll find out.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  hair’s undone. The waiter says, Buy you a farewell cognac? I say thanks and settle in with coat covering my grease-spattered uniform. The waiter downs his own drink. Standing, he slides spare bills across the bar, adding—before he flips his cashmere scarf around his neck Lautrec-style—At least I’ve helped you to master the fish knife. I hold the glass globe in my hand as the dim yellow lights slide off its perimeter, and boy, does that drink slide down like scorched sunshine. I’m just draining it when the manager—no doubt eager to see me leaving—flies up and buys me another. And right before Warren comes, I ponder a third. What the hell, right? I’m unemployed, with school loans I can’t pay, an invalid dad whose nursing I need to start chipping in on. When I lift my index finger, the barman wipes his hands and refills my snifter. I’m the sole customer—the barman having just covered his olives and cherries with cling film—when he nonchalantly slides a white slip of paper to me. I nonchalantly flip it over. The bill comes to twenty dollars. Hold it, I say, those two bought my other drinks. I’m well buzzed by then, wavering. I know, he says. This is for the third one. I cling to the edge of the bar and say, That cognac was twenty dollars? He nods. I drank sixty dollars’ worth of cognac just now? His nod is stiffer this time. The bar itself starts a slow swim around me, as if on a hydraulic pole. I explain that twenty dollars is approximately one tenth of my rent. The shoes I have on probably cost ten if they were sneakers. He says, I can go get Patrick if you want to dispute it. I’m too drunk by this time to dispute anything with anybody. Can’t they take it out of my check? He tells me that he personally has to level out the till. Even though Warren, who probably has twenty bucks, is en route to pick me up, I instinctively know he’ll cringe at my begging a loan. Before we left on our camping trip, he’d been horrified to find out I had just a few hundred bucks in my account. If I remember right, he’d been ripped off by an alleged pal in a trip across Europe, and his life’s goal involves living sparsely enough never again to be forced to ask his father for money. So we always split even the smallest breakfast chits. If anything, I have the poor girl’s need to prove solvency that makes me an inveterate check grabber. Age about seventeen, I stopped counting on my parents for rent and food. (I need to go to the dentist, I told Mother once. To which she said, Ask around on campus, I’m sure you’ll find a cheap one. Translation: Shift for yourself.) Among the artists I dated, chivalry seldom figured in. In Cambridge the barman stacks glasses, glancing up like I’m a shoplifter.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  The black face flickered: “Tell me about the places you’ve been that have tilted to dump you here.” Velvet . . . Suede . . . “Let me see. Let me wake Benny and get some more coffee. No. Never mind. The boy should sleep. I’ll get it myself.” (After minutes, Proctor returns to the deer skin; sits, sipping at the steaming cup.) “Listen. Yes, I will tell you, in a bit. Let me get comfortable. Ah, now . . . Well! Something of an academic prodigy, I finished on scholarship, from a good, but small college, at eighteen; went on to graduate third in my class from medical school; but at the prospect of interning, I realized I was not meant to practice. It came with pain and a feeling of failure. That was the first time I doubted my public self. I retreated back into the university. The medical degree was my mark of failure—I was terrified of corpses, and even more of the live patients who filled the City Hospital’s emergency ward. Still, a foreign object in academe, my medical diploma awed the humanities professors. I was twenty-three when I took my Ph.D. in historical anthropology. (We did not really have the structuralists to contend with then.) The double doctorate is the most lucrative of combinations. I have never used it. With the grant that followed, I flung myself upon Europe within days of graduation, determined to be the most dissolute of tourists. Young Dr. John hitchhiked where he could have trained, ferried where he could have flown, itinerary dictated thoroughly by whim; I ate and slept deck passage on steamers all over the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean. The reports that have come back to me of that time from those who knew me then are that I was personable, even engaging, lively, intense, and very dirty. I could have been called, if the word has meaning, innocent at eighteen. By twenty-three I had engaged in only the most desultory amorous experiences. But by twenty-five there was nothing I had not done. You see me now? No act I have committed since is not some variation or repetition of something done before I finished my first quarter century. It began, I remember, with liquor and the old woman who lived on the top floor of the house where I took an apartment near school. (And then, hadn’t I thought it ended the next morning with the sixteen year old girl, her granddaughter, who lived downstairs, and who had been an initiate since she was half that age?) On the continent, it blossomed. In the night alleys of the capitals of Europe I sold myself to old men and bought the favors of young women. I met the Count, and for him, shortly, supervised the entourage he traveled with, a harem of adolescent delinquents from the gutters of Madrid, Rome, Copenhagen, and Marseilles. He used to say I should have been named ‘Petronius.’ Everywhere we visited we brought sensuous, chaotic laughter, the hysteric merriment of the depraved. I hunted new girls to appease his boys who demanded such payment for servicing the Count himself. I hunted new boys to replace the ones lost through the general temperament of such young men, or to the police (all were thieves: half had passed time in correctional institutions), or the ones who had fallen out of favor with our master.

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  So, Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice say that the church needs to “recover reconciliation as the mission of God.”7 Why Should We Pursue Reconciliation?I (Graham) need to confess something. I am racist. It’s taken a while for me to admit this truth, but I finally have. As a white Australian man, I’ve held views about other cultures and races that are shameful. I’ve embraced a sense of superiority and entitlement that is often well hidden but that nonetheless shapes my view of the world and of other people. My sense of superiority and my subtle racism has shaped my positive attitudes about people like me and my negative attitudes about other ethnicities and groups. This has been so even while I’ve mouthed words about equality, respect, and reconciliation. This has been the case even while I’ve denied the presence of racism in my own life or in the people and institutions around me. So I need to acknowledge that I’ve indulged in subtle and shameful forms of racism. In doing so I’ve perpetuated the injustices around me, and I’ve prevented justice, peace, compassion, and reconciliation. I’m slowly changing. Little by little, I’m letting go of attitudes that my white privilege has formed in me over a lifetime. This is a slow, painful process. But I’m getting there as I listen to closely to the feedback, insights, and experience of people of color and as I submit to the Spirit. I (Grace) want to share about the racial tension between African Americans and Korean Americans, which has had some negative consequences. Asian immigration to the United States began in the mid-1800s and continued during the country’s westward expansion. Asians became “cheap labor” and were viewed as a commodity. The annexation of California in 1848 opened the floodgates for Asian labor. Asians first arrived in Hawaii, and over three hundred thousand of them entered the islands between 1850 and 1920.8 Koreans initially did not want to immigrate to the United States, but some missionaries persuaded members of their congregations to go to Hawaii, a Christian land. As a result, an estimated 40 percent of the seven thousand emigrants who left the country between December 1902 and May 1905 were converts.9 Christianity has played a big role in Korean immigrants’ community and individual growth. They formed their own ethnic communities to worship, learn cultural heritage, and teach Korean language to their children. African American history is vastly different from Asian American history. It began in 1619 when Africans were brought as slaves to North America to help in the production of lucrative crops such as tobacco. Slaves helped build the economy of the United States by working in the fields. By the mid-nineteenth century, growth in the abolition movement led to the Civil War (1861–1865) and eventually to the Union victory, which freed four million slaves. By the 1960s lots of work still needed to be done, which led to the civil rights movement.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  Three grisailles, later glazed: two men, a man and a woman, and two women made their loves on swirled sheets. Beneath the triptych was a panel as long as the three together, of ties, underwear, loafers, high heel shoes, slips, brassieres. She found it amusing.” The captain’s teeth were yellow in the candlelight. “I know Geana Liana’s house near Bombay. I bought two blond children from her seven years ago.” “Yes, she sells children.” “And I know the paintings. She keeps them well cleaned.” “She does?” The captain nodded. “Suetonius describes the wall mural of the Capri pleasure palace of the Emperor Tiberius. It was reputedly destroyed when the palace fell. Later, it was rumored to have survived in the Vatican collection of forbidden art. But there was a mural in her hall that much better suited the description than the one in Rome . . . You say she honors my paintings?” The captain nodded. “You say she was not twenty-one when you knew her. When I bought Kirsten and Gunner from her, she was over forty. And your paintings were honored.” Proctor nodded, smiling. “So I became a painter. And also a writer. When I struck out for home, I had all my adventures in a trunk full of notebooks. I wrote a novel. For a decade after its publication, it was moderately popular. The book, which I published at twenty-six, recounted the wanderings of a young man in search of himself across our extravagant world. I reached this country with my sheaf of manuscripts, and had no trouble selling it. All of what I’ve told you is in it. But how transformed! The Count is an effete old man who sits sadly in cafes, ogling pretty girls. Olaf and Tossi are there—his black and blond bodyguards, as I describe them. And the peasant girl crying in the empty rooms of the Zurich hotel where the Count’s last party was held before his disappearance has become someone kissed in the shadow by a strange, dark man who would not say his name. Guido and Pietro—the upright grave digger and his son who befriended the hero? Catherine and her Duke? Oh, they are there: the benevolent aristocrats who aid him because they sense some spark of vision to be nurtured. Why does the Duchessa send him away, after a mysterious night walking among the graves? She feels attracted to him, but loves the duke too deeply to hurt him with jealousy. Even Geana Liana—oh, I allowed hints of exotic intrigues to move about her as she helps the hero to his artistic burgeonings—in my story he paints her portrait, I believe—but the hints are misted with the Eastern Unknown. “Oh, I lied and lied in that book! “It was popular with both critics and readers.

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  But it is a power the world does not often understand. In weakness, foolishness, and vulnerability we discover a world-transforming power. In humility and self-giving we open space for God to reveal his power. It is the power of grace and love. It is the power of peace and integrity. It is the power of the Spirit and truth. It is the power that honors and heals, forgives, and unites. It is the power of giving power away. Relinquishing Racial PowerI (Graham) am the direct beneficiary of white privilege. I grew up in a working-class family in one of the poorest areas of Sydney. My grandfather didn’t own a pair of shoes before joining the Australian Army to fight in the Second World War. Growing up among the workers of the banana plantations in northern New South Wales, my family was poor and rural. Wounded during the fighting in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, my grandfather returned to Australia to work menial-labor jobs his whole life. He never spoke about the horrors he experienced in the war, but at his funeral an Australian Army officer described how most of his battalion had been killed in the unspeakable violence that unfolded in those jungles. His son, my father, struggled to read and write, and he left school at an early age. My father was a truck driver, and my mother worked various retail jobs. Both left school when they were young and worked hard their whole lives to buy us a home and send us to a small private school in one of the poorest parts of Sydney. But even with those struggles, I am still aware of the way I have benefited from white privilege. My grandfather and grandmother received government pensions for their military service in the Second World War. They also had government financial support in the areas of housing and health care. But the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander soldiers who served alongside my grandparents—even those who were wounded—received nothing. Many did not receive a single dollar. More than four thousand Aboriginal men and women and 850 Torres Strait Islanders served in the war. They were pilots, sailors, soldiers, nurses, and more. But they were mostly forgotten after the war and were denied the financial, housing, and health care benefits given their white peers. Being former soldiers did not stop the Australian government from taking their children away from them. My (Graham’s) grandparents and parents worked hard at laboring and menial jobs to send us to a good school. I’m grateful for their effort and hard work! But I remember my Aboriginal childhood friends (I didn’t have many Aboriginal friends when I was a boy, but I had a few). The fathers of my Aboriginal friends were often denied jobs and could never afford to send their children to the school that I went to.

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  So we are the inheritors of a legacy of Christian practice; on the one side are Christian practices that form people to operate in worldly power, and on the other side are Christian practices that form people to live into their weakness and their journey in God’s strength. Let me be clear: the difference is not one of occupation. The difference is not between those involved in politics, government, industry, business, entertainment, the academy, and a host of other fields and those who are not. The difference is not between those who carry an optimism into these fields of endeavor and those who look at all operations of the world with a cunning cynicism. Indeed, one of the foolish things that has plagued the contemporary turn to practices has been people who have tried to approach faithful Christian practices as an alternative set of operations of politics, government, industry, business, entertainment, the academy, and so forth. They take isolation as a goal of faithfulness, an essential element of Christian identity, and a characteristic of witness. Their folly comes from their blindness to colonial history, which has irreversibly connected this world together through a fabric of commodity chains, ecological manipulation, and violence. More importantly, this approach does not yet grasp our weakness—we are in the world, but we don’t belong to it. The difference between Christian practices that form people to operate in worldly power and practices that form people to live in the strength of the Spirit of God through their weakness is a difference not of quality, or consistency, or even knowledge, but of community. Faithful Christian practices today that follow Jesus are practices done in and among diverse communities where the histories of colonial wounds are addressed. No Christian practice done inside segregationist ways of living and thinking will draw us into our true strength in God. This was the fundamental flaw born of colonial Christian practice, a vision of Christian life comfortably separated along lines of gender, race, land ownership and land dispossession, national affiliation, neo-tribal designation, and money. Kim and Hill in this courageous book are not simply offering us another account of Christian practices, but Christian practices that necessitate diverse communities for their performance. The crucial matter today for Christian discipleship is not what you practice but who you practice with. Who is present in our confession and repentance, in our lamenting and our justice work, in our offering hospitality and renouncing power? Whose stories, voices, wisdom, authority, guidance are missing when we gather to do church? Who is not present in giving shape to our prayers and praise, our advocacy and proclamation?

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  It goes up; nothing comes out.” “But . . . ?” He pushed the boy away. Gunner, puzzled, moved toward the line of light that should be the door, unsteady on the mattresses. Once a woman reached up to play the cords of his inner thigh. He lingered long enough to stiffen but pulled away at the kiss. By the door he found his pants, slipped his legs in, tied his belt and stepped into the hall. A breeze blew from the alley. Gunner walked to the doorway, stood with his toes over the broken top step. A breeze dried and cooled his chest. Nazi stood by the drain pipe, taking his dick out to piss. He saw the boy. (Does he grin or does he smile?) “Hey.” He beckoned Gunner, took his shoulder. Nazi swiveled his boot toe, then he put his bare foot on Gunner’s (the chain is cold against Gunner’s ankle; the gritty sole is hot). Gunner reached for Nazi’s cock, his small fingers slipping between the big, dirty knuckles. Nazi’s mouth broke a wide grin. He kneaded the boy’s neck. On the hard shiny arm a dragon writhed about a blue swastika. Nazi smelled. Gunner heard water; a hot splash on his belly. He looked down to the arc glittering: Nazi guided it to Gunner’s groin, leg, sparkling and darkening the canvas. A rain on their doubled foot. The hand on Gunner’s shoulder became a weight. Gunner gave, and his wet knees knocked Nazi’s shins. Nazi’s urine beat belly, chest, chin. He caught the boy’s hair, yanked. Gunner’s face flooded and he lost the view of the spurting cock. His eyes went tight before the burning. His head was pushed back, so his mouth opened. The taste of hot ocean foamed between his cheeks. Nazi laughed. Fist’s rim butted his face: then something bitter, butting, as the ocean dribbled away. He held Nazi’s pockets, and pushed his face into the wet denim. Nazi shoved his cock in Gunner’s gaping . . . gagged on the first three thrusts; then hungrily caught the hips’ rhythmic sag. Hair ground his blind face, its rush timed to the drawling— “—suck it up . . . drink it up . . . cocksucker . . . motherfucker . . . ass eater . . . little shit face—” Hands clamped Gunner’s ears and pulled him in, pulled him in again. “—suck that dick—yeah, yeah—eat the shit off it—make me juice you up, boy—God damn cocksucking, dick eating, piss headed, cunt faced— Ahhhhh! ” Nazi let himself lean back on the wall. Gunner rocked on the soaked lap, leaning against the legs—the left one quivered, quivered again—listening to the gasps.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  I mean, if the maybe works out.” The dog lolloped before them. ‘ The Hall of Mirrors ’ windows were hung with maroon curtains. Niger floundered about the door. The captain quieted him when they caught up. Kirsten pushed the handle. Gunner peered around her shoulder, followed her. The dog gained center floor, barked. The captain stepped in. “What do you want? What are you doing here? Who are you?” The captain stopped, barefoot, in the sawdust. Gunner and Kirsten blinked by his hip: Big like a barrel. Arms, shoulders, chest and belly, snarled with amber. Round head shaved smooth. Wide belt (iron studs) worn low enough to show where red belly-hair thickened toward pubic. His crusty pants were tucked unevenly in the tops of his boots. One hand fondled the stock of the rifle on the bar. On the mirror a calendar marked it Saturday the twenty-first. “I captain The Scorpion. It’s on your dock now. I’m looking for . . . someone—you?” “Bull, I’m holding the place down till the owner gets back.” Niger barked. “I like your dog, nigger.” Then Bull grinned. “I’m police in this town.” Leaving his gun, he walked with a listing stride to the captain, stuck out his hand — “You got business with Nazi? He’s out pickin’ up his new girl.” —thick with callous, gloved with red hair, nail wrecked with gnawing. “I just want to know something.” The captain shook. “About what?” Bull passed his fist on to Gunner’s hair, lifted Kirsten’s chin with a foreknuckle. “Fine kids.” The captain looked at the bare-chested lawman carefully. Then he said, “You can have them for an hour, if you can tell me what I want to know.” (Sometimes, everything flattens, becomes unreal, but . . .) Bull looked up, frowned. Then the frown broke on yellow teeth. “How old are they?” “The boy’s thirteen. The girl’s fifteen.” “You just sell them to pleasure strangers?” “You bought a lot of it, ain’t you, mister?” Bull frowned again. Then, still careful, he nodded. The captain said, “I got Gunner on the streets of an Indian port just below Bombay: six, and pimping among the sailors for Kirsten here. I bought both children from the woman who owned them. They’d been kidnapped from a northern ship. What they got from me is better than what they would have had.” Bull let his eyes drop to the girl. He stuck his finger under the neck of her smock, and brushed the upper slope of her breast with the red hair on his knuckle. “How would you like to sit in my face, little mama? Give your cunt some good tongue work.” Kirsten giggled. Bull placed his finger on Gunner’s nose. “My spigot’s got a couple of good pumps underneath. It’s a fat dick, an’ you suck it, it’ll pump you full.” He pressed the boy’s nose away. “How do you take to the idea of me licking out your sister’s pussy?”

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  The black face flickered: “Tell me about the places you’ve been that have tilted to dump you here.” Velvet . . . Suede . . . “Let me see. Let me wake Benny and get some more coffee. No. Never mind. The boy should sleep. I’ll get it myself.” (After minutes, Proctor returns to the deer skin; sits, sipping at the steaming cup.) “Listen. Yes, I will tell you, in a bit. Let me get comfortable. Ah, now . . . Well! Something of an academic prodigy, I finished on scholarship, from a good, but small college, at eighteen; went on to graduate third in my class from medical school; but at the prospect of interning, I realized I was not meant to practice. It came with pain and a feeling of failure. That was the first time I doubted my public self. I retreated back into the university. The medical degree was my mark of failure—I was terrified of corpses, and even more of the live patients who filled the City Hospital’s emergency ward. Still, a foreign object in academe, my medical diploma awed the humanities professors. I was twenty-three when I took my Ph.D. in historical anthropology. (We did not really have the structuralists to contend with then.) The double doctorate is the most lucrative of combinations. I have never used it. With the grant that followed, I flung myself upon Europe within days of graduation, determined to be the most dissolute of tourists. Young Dr. John hitchhiked where he could have trained, ferried where he could have flown, itinerary dictated thoroughly by whim; I ate and slept deck passage on steamers all over the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean. The reports that have come back to me of that time from those who knew me then are that I was personable, even engaging, lively, intense, and very dirty. I could have been called, if the word has meaning, innocent at eighteen. By twenty-three I had engaged in only the most desultory amorous experiences. But by twenty-five there was nothing I had not done. You see me now? No act I have committed since is not some variation or repetition of something done before I finished my first quarter century. It began, I remember, with liquor and the old woman who lived on the top floor of the house where I took an apartment near school. (And then, hadn’t I thought it ended the next morning with the sixteen year old girl, her granddaughter, who lived downstairs, and who had been an initiate since she was half that age?) On the continent, it blossomed. In the night alleys of the capitals of Europe I sold myself to old men and bought the favors of young women. I met the Count, and for him, shortly, supervised the entourage he traveled with, a harem of adolescent delinquents from the gutters of Madrid, Rome, Copenhagen, and Marseilles. He used to say I should have been named ‘Petronius.’ Everywhere we visited we brought sensuous, chaotic laughter, the hysteric merriment of the depraved. I hunted new girls to appease his boys who demanded such payment for servicing the Count himself. I hunted new boys to replace the ones lost through the general temperament of such young men, or to the police (all were thieves: half had passed time in correctional institutions), or the ones who had fallen out of favor with our master.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Which in some lackluster fashion, I did until his father came to keep him for the weekend, while I disappeared into my sublet. Before Warren got there, Dev was Superman, and I was a distinctly unwondrous Wonder Woman. Check. In the hospital dark, lying there, crying for my son, I realize that one of the last big suggestions I’d failed to take regularly was praying on my knees. Janice’s voice comes back: You don’t do it for God. In the hospital, I have this urge to kneel, yet to do so in public—in front of my sighing, unsettled roommate—seems, well, obscene somehow. I tiptoe to the bathroom and bend onto the cold tiles. Thanks, whoever the fuck you are, I say, for keeping me sober. I feel small, kneeling there. Small and needy and inadequate. Pathetic, even. Like somebody who can’t handle things. Which is fairly accurate, after all, for the average inmate. If you’re God, I say, you know I feel small and needy and inadequate. And tonight I want a drink. The silence fails to say anything back. I glare at it. It feels like judgment, the silence. And at that silence I give off rage; I start a ranting prayer in my head that goes something like this: Fuck you for making me an alcoholic. For making my baby sick all the time when he was so tiny. You’re a fucking amateur, torturing a baby like that, you fuck. And my daddy withering into that form. What pleasure do you get from…from smiting people? I feel something stir in me, a small wisp of something in my chest, frail as smoke. It is—strangely—the sweetness of my love for my daddy and my son. It blesses me an instant like incense. My eyes sting, and I blurt out, Thanks for them. I feel the stillness around me widen a notch. Thanks that my son is sleeping safe at home without fever or coughing; and my husband, who may yet take me back. The boundaries of my skin grow thin as I kneel there squinting my eyes shut. For a nanosecond, I am lucent. Inside it: an idea, the thread of a different perspective than any I’ve ever had. It’s a thought so counterintuitive, so unlike how I think, it feels as if it originates from outside me. The voice—the idea—comes in solid quiet in the midst of psychic chaos, and it says, If Dev hadn’t been sick so much, you’d have kept drinking…. Which is wholly true. If Dev had been one of those blank-eyed, anesthetized little blobs who slept infancy away, I could’ve sotted up his early years. Staying up with him—what with the trips to the hospital, which I’d thought were my punishment or ruin—I’d found a strange kind of rescue.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  “ ‘Tomorrow I will loan you paints and brushes. And you will paint a mural on the wall of the West Chamber with the white jade columns.’ “I painted the wall. Three grisailles, later glazed: two men, a man and a woman, and two women made their loves on swirled sheets. Beneath the triptych was a panel as long as the three together, of ties, underwear, loafers, high heel shoes, slips, brassieres. She found it amusing.” The captain’s teeth were yellow in the candlelight. “I know Geana Liana’s house near Bombay. I bought two blond children from her seven years ago.” “Yes, she sells children.” “And I know the paintings. She keeps them well cleaned.” “She does?” The captain nodded. “Suetonius describes the wall mural of the Capri pleasure palace of the Emperor Tiberius. It was reputedly destroyed when the palace fell. Later, it was rumored to have survived in the Vatican collection of forbidden art. But there was a mural in her hall that much better suited the description than the one in Rome . . . You say she honors my paintings?” The captain nodded. “You say she was not twenty-one when you knew her. When I bought Kirsten and Gunner from her, she was over forty. And your paintings were honored.” Proctor nodded, smiling. “So I became a painter. And also a writer. When I struck out for home, I had all my adventures in a trunk full of notebooks. I wrote a novel. For a decade after its publication, it was moderately popular. The book, which I published at twenty-six, recounted the wanderings of a young man in search of himself across our extravagant world. I reached this country with my sheaf of manuscripts, and had no trouble selling it. All of what I’ve told you is in it. But how transformed! The Count is an effete old man who sits sadly in cafes, ogling pretty girls. Olaf and Tossi are there—his black and blond bodyguards, as I describe them. And the peasant girl crying in the empty rooms of the Zurich hotel where the Count’s last party was held before his disappearance has become someone kissed in the shadow by a strange, dark man who would not say his name. Guido and Pietro—the upright grave digger and his son who befriended the hero? Catherine and her Duke? Oh, they are there: the benevolent aristocrats who aid him because they sense some spark of vision to be nurtured. Why does the Duchessa send him away, after a mysterious night walking among the graves? She feels attracted to him, but loves the duke too deeply to hurt him with jealousy. Even Geana Liana—oh, I allowed hints of exotic intrigues to move about her as she helps the hero to his artistic burgeonings—in my story he paints her portrait, I believe—but the hints are misted with the Eastern Unknown. “Oh, I lied and lied in that book!

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I cling to the edge of the bar and say, That cognac was twenty dollars? He nods. I drank sixty dollars’ worth of cognac just now? His nod is stiffer this time. The bar itself starts a slow swim around me, as if on a hydraulic pole. I explain that twenty dollars is approximately one tenth of my rent. The shoes I have on probably cost ten if they were sneakers. He says, I can go get Patrick if you want to dispute it. I’m too drunk by this time to dispute anything with anybody. Can’t they take it out of my check? He tells me that he personally has to level out the till. Even though Warren, who probably has twenty bucks, is en route to pick me up, I instinctively know he’ll cringe at my begging a loan. Before we left on our camping trip, he’d been horrified to find out I had just a few hundred bucks in my account. If I remember right, he’d been ripped off by an alleged pal in a trip across Europe, and his life’s goal involves living sparsely enough never again to be forced to ask his father for money. So we always split even the smallest breakfast chits. If anything, I have the poor girl’s need to prove solvency that makes me an inveterate check grabber. Age about seventeen, I stopped counting on my parents for rent and food. (I need to go to the dentist, I told Mother once. To which she said, Ask around on campus, I’m sure you’ll find a cheap one. Translation: Shift for yourself.) Among the artists I dated, chivalry seldom figured in. In Cambridge the barman stacks glasses, glancing up like I’m a shoplifter. Pretty soon Warren comes in wearing a down jacket, looking tall enough to offset my busgirl scumminess. I draw him aside and explain, perhaps slurrily, why I need a twenty, just till the next day. I want to pay off the glaring barman posthaste. But Warren stares in disbelief, saying, When Tom and I drink with his friend for four hours, the whole bill isn’t twenty dollars. By this time the manager has set his coffee cup on the bar alongside his keys. Warren says, Why didn’t you go to the machine? I haven’t gotten an ATM card yet, I say. Where’s your credit card? I lost it, I lie, for I couldn’t tell him the one I’d used to pay for a hotel once had long since been snipped in half at some cash register. This debt wasn’t just recklessly come by, being due to last-minute plane tickets when Daddy had one stroke after another. You’re not out of money, are you? I’m not. Though I’m within a month of it.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I crave the stuff and can’t afford it. I wind up in a room facing a guy in a monk’s robe, a giant crucifix hanging from his belt like a scalp. Brother Francis (not his name) is over eighty and skeletally thin, with sunken cheeks and blue veins all over an age-spotted skull. The liter of Coke sits on the low table between us, alongside an ashtray. The instant I sit down, he pulls out a pack of rolling papers and constructs an immaculate ciggie while I light up. Both of us smoke like tar kilns the whole time as legal pads I flip through quickly pile in my lap—minor offenses. But when it comes to the wreckage of my romantic past, I stall, holding my styrofoam cup as I press my thumbnail around the rim in a series of half moons. We seem to have reached an impasse, he says. Well, Francis, there are some things I’m uncomfortable talking about with you. His thin lips draw on his hand-rolled stogie. He says with an expression of terrifying hilarity, Are they things of a sexual nature? I nod. He exhales smoke and says, Maybe I can put you at ease, for I’ve had more experience in that area than my vows would suggest. He tells me some pretty hair-raising stories about his life in South America, when he was still on the whiskey. How he wound up joining a twelve-step program for people whose sexual natures were—in his words—severely disordered. His tale doesn’t involve pedophilia or some fetish for disemboweling kittens or anything gross. But my betrayals—cheating on a college beau, making out with my English boyfriend’s Afghan squash-playing pal—pretty much pale alongside his. I sit and listen until dark comes, and the next morning I come back for most of the day. At the end, jazzed to the gills on many plastic bottles of Coke, I sit drained over the overflowing ashtray, and Brother Francis blinks behind his smeary

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  But unless a book publisher stitches them into a volume, I’ll never land the teaching job that’ll let me shed snakeskinlike the business suit I wear like an unwilling drag queen. It’s an old dream. Age about seven, I started posing for the jacket photo in the bathroom shaving mirror. When my sister caught me wearing the baleful, heavy-lidded pout I figured would look snappy, she’d cackle like a magpie, then holler to Mother I’d stolen her beret again. My response? I’d pinch my index finger and thumb together over and over and go psss psss psss like a puff adder. Somehow I’d figured out that this gesture drove her batshit. By age thirty, I’m not writing squat, which I blame on my ramped-up consulting schedule, knowing full well my favorite poet was a full-time insurance exec. Warren keeps urging me to deal with my complicated family on the page, but that seems too damp-eyed, though even I know the crap I crank out referring to Homer and Virgil is pretentious before Warren carefully pens pretentious on page bottom. The bathtub I’m lying in feels like a stone island I’ve shipwrecked myself on. My pantyhose have twisted around, and the black unwashed soles gross me out. I’m a hack, a hired ghostwriter who gins out reports on Swedish telecommunications companies, or phone technology, or packet switching and deregulation. Oh, and reviews of assholes who’ve actually published poetry collections, in a magazine my husband edits. Which, if he didn’t revise my prose with a hacksaw, I probably wouldn’t get in to. Bam bam bam. The door rattles. I holler out, You grisly fuckers! If I had a firearm, I’d hunt each of you down like the dogs you are. Now I’ve taken up a weensy bottle of Scotch, J&B in the green bottle. What moron designed these bottles so small? And why a minibar when a maxibar is clearly what’s called for? Today on the phone, the big-deal consultant who got me into this business said, Your having to give this presentation in my stead is a little like going to work in the hospital as a janitor and winding up performing brain surgery. Don’t remind me, I said. Think about it, he mused. Your whole business career has derived from a series of flukes.... While he talked, I stretched the phone cord and dexterously slipped the small fridge key into its slot. I said, Aren’t you supposed to be finding flights? My travel agent’s going to ring the other line, he said. He was a captain of industry, this guy. Once the thirtysomething president of my old company’s e-mail subsidiary, he’d left to consult for big bucks, promising me enough subcontracting work in ghostwriting and market research to hang out my own consulting shingle. I could double my salary while freeing up intervals for poetry. On the phone to me, he said, You can write the next great business best seller.

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

  Here is a description of Mediterranean honor and shame, from a 1965 cross-cultural anthology; Pierre Bourdieu is speaking on the basis of his field work among the Berber tribesmen of Algerian Kabylia in the late fifties: The point of honour is the basis of the moral code of an individual who sees himself always through the eyes of others, who has need of others for his existence, because the image he has of himself is indistinguishable from that presented to him by other people…. Respectability, the reverse of shame, is the characteristic of a person who needs other people in order to grasp his own identity and whose conscience is a kind of interiorization of others, since these fulfill for him the role of witness and judge…. He who has lost his honour no longer exists. He ceases to exist for other people, and at the same time he ceases to exist for himself.* The key phrase here is through the eyes of others , and the more we understand that process, the more radically challenging Jesus’ Kingdom of God starts to appear. We might see Jesus’ message and program as quaintly eccentric or charmingly iconoclastic (at least at a safe distance), but for those who take their very identity from the eyes of their peers, the idea of eating together and living together without any distinctions, differences, discriminations, or hierarchies is close to the irrational and the absurd. And the one who advocates or does it is close to the deviant and the perverted. He has no honor. He has no shame. Radical Egalitarianism Open commensality is the symbol and embodiment of radical egalitarianism, of an absolute equality of people that denies the validity of any discrimination between them and negates the necessity of any hierarchy among them. To all of this there is an obvious objection: you are just speaking of contemporary democracy and anachronistically retrojecting that back into the time and onto the lips of Jesus. I look, in reply and defense, both to general anthropology and to specific history during the first century. Those who, like peasants, live with a boot on their neck can easily envision two different dreams. One is quick revenge—a world in which they might get in turn to put their boots on those other necks. Another is reciprocal justice—a world in which there would never again be any boots on any necks. Thus, for example, the anthropologist James C. Scott, moving from Europe to Southeast Asia, notes the popular tradition’s common reaction to such disparate elite traditions as Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam, and argues very persuasively that peasant culture and religion are actually an anticulture, criticizing alike both the religious and political elites that oppress it.

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

  But at least he did not murder him as David had murdered Uriah, so David judges himself deserving of worse than death. Nathan then recounts all that God will do to punish David, saying, “The sword shall never depart from your house” (12:10), and David has the grace—finally—to acknowledge, “I have sinned against the Lord” (12:13)—not to mention against Bathsheba and Uriah. Once again, that example parable is easily decoded—at least for us at this safe distance. David is the rich man with “very many herds and flocks,” that is, his own wives and concubines. Uriah is the poor man with “one little ewe lamb,” that is, his wife Bathsheba. And so the rich man “takes” the poor man’s only lamb. It is simple enough to move from the literal to the metaphorical register and from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic level. Those two example parables are very short paragraph-length ones, even if their contexts are quite involved. But the biblical tradition also contains chapter-length and even book-length example parables before the time of Jesus. The best known chapter-length example parables are in Daniel 1–6. Those example parables imagine Jewish sages as royal courtiers under the Babylonian or Median emperors in the 600s and 500s BCE . The most famous ones are the example parables about the three youths in the fiery furnace under the Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar (Dan. 3) and Daniel in the lions’ den under the Median monarch Darius (Dan. 6). Their moral message is very clear. Those Jews who remained faithful to their ancestral traditions and covenantal commitments were magnificently successful as courtiers in the royal palace. The message by example is that Jewishness is an asset and not a liability because, if you stay faithful to God, God will protect you and all will be well. Longer book-length example stories are found both in the Hebrew and Protestant canons of the Bible and also outside them in those of the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox traditions. Among the latter are such example parables as the book of Judith, named after its heroine, who is imagined as saving her people by killing a general named Holofernes, sent against her people by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. An alternate mode of resistance to Assyrian oppression is depicted by the example parable of the book of Tobit, named after its main character, Tobit, who was exiled to Nineveh after the Assyrian destruction of northern Israel in the late 700s BCE . Before and after Tobit’s deportation he remained absolutely faithful to God and everything worked out for the best, despite his own many difficulties and his family’s many dangers. Finally, the book-length example parable of Esther is found in all those varied canons. It is named after the heroine who saved her people under the Persian monarch Ahasuerus/Xerxes. All three of those example-parable books show that living with great courage, covenantal fidelity, and traditional piety always ensures a happy ending.