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 46 of 267 · 20 per page

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  Don’t you think I have this fantastic preoccupation as well as you? I’m an artist: imagination is a weakness we share. If you could merely arrive, tear off your clothes, throw yourself between the knees of whatever buck hauled out his—” He stopped, because she was looking down at her hands. “You tried. Quite admirably, I might add.” “It was so dark in there, I couldn’t even see who it was who . . .” “But you were afraid they could see you? They could, you know. You were the last one in. There was a light on in the hall. When you stepped through the open door, there was a moment when your eager, expectant face was in full view of all those already—I’m sorry. I’m being cruel. But my simple point is: even so, it doesn’t matter. We, above all people, have learned how to keep secrets. When you leave here, no one outside will know. Your skirt is neat; you’ve sustained no terribly large bruises; your hair? That can be counted to the sea breeze outside—” “Ohhh . . .” on an indrawn breath. “My . . . do you have a . . .” She reached for his arm: stopped before she touched him, stared at her hand, jerked it back. “. . . comb. Oh I can’t . . . anymore, I’m afraid to . . . You must have a—comb? I . . . ” She let her head fall forward. Her shoulders shook twice. The dark red hair, which wasn’t very messy at all, swung forward. When she looked up, bright tracks descending her cheeks, she blinked. “I’m afraid to . . .” (Head shaking.) “. . . touch anybody, now!” Proctor reared his chair back again and locked his hands over his stomach. “Go home, Peggy-Ann. Go home. It will all be over in a sleep and a shower and the nice, smiling man who will come tomorrow—if not tomorrow, next month, next year.” She stood, reaching to steady herself on the table, but even drew back there. “I’m . . . not going home, you know. When I went out I was on my way to . . . church.” Proctor raised an eyebrow. “Father Michael, he’s my advisor, there. We study together. That’s where I met . . . Catherine. She studies with him too.” “Her new priest?” “He’s not an ordinary . . . I mean, he’s been all over the country. He’s very interested in the problems of today. He . . .” “Catherine has even less tolerance for stupid priests than she has for stupid women,” He narrowed his eyes. “Her one totally accomplished talent is the corruption of both. I’ve known her a while.” “I . . . was supposed to go and talk to Father Michael tonight.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Mrs. Whitbread looks exasperated. Of course, darling. I thought they should experience it. Warren goes on, And your client said, What are you doing? Mr. Whitbread tosses some nuts into his mouth, saying, I suppose I told him I was preparing my argument. And he said, Now? (Working for The Washington Post at the time, Geoffrey Wolff—that frailest of bridges between Warren’s parents and me—later claimed Mr. Whitbread was the only man he ever saw talk down to the Supreme Court.) At dinner, I’d seen my lover’s fine jaw flex as he studied his plate, and I’d felt the liquid warmth of our time together evaporate as he braced himself for his father’s scrutiny. Now I long for some definitive gesture to free him, to throw my port glass into the fireplace and stalk out with a poor kid’s piety, riding off with him in his Mazda into a life with nary a polo divet to stomp. But the house’s disabling comfort saps resolve. And by the time we’re in the library, I’ve begun to breathe in the parents’ gentility. The conversation is so adroit—the nonchalance so juicy—I lap it up as Tiger did our fatty scraps, steel bowls rattling on the kitchen tiles. I want to believe I’m at home with these composed individuals. They’re liberal in their politics, after all. From where I sit on the low settee wedged among needlepoint pillows, I can see a whole shelf devoted to the egalitarian writings of Thomas Jefferson. Surely they recognize my native intellect. At some point Mrs. Whitbread says casually, What religion does your family practice, Mary? Which I take as interest in my strangely compelling history. I think of my mother, who studied every faith and—with her husbands—committed to none. We’re not anything, really, I say. But I find myself dredging up a few childhood visits to the Presbyterian church, for I know a joke punch line about Episcopalians being Presbyterians with trust funds. But I catch Mrs. Whitbread’s unmet glance toward Warren, and it dawns on me that had he brought home his classmate Caroline Kennedy, her being a Catholic might have been a mark against her.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  BULL’S TALE:I used to live in the town next to this one, for a long time. Cugarsville? (He settles closer to Gunner in the dark, and wonders if the boy is asleep, but talks anyway.) Back when I was about eighteen or so I got this bitch knocked up. We got married, see. And she’s been dropping kids—I guess most of them are mine—every year since; although we don’t hardly live together no more. She’s a mean old whore is what she is. The middle girl, Bethy, she probably the sweetest one. Pretty. That’s when I got so I could go back and spend a couple of days with the old lady without trying to break her head before I left. Bethy, we’d go for walks in the woods, and tell each other stories. And wrestle too. She liked that. Shit, that little bitch could throw cunt around fast as her mama. I’d get me liquored up, and go scratch on the back window. She’d slip out. Nine. And I could always get two fingers into any of my little girls’ pussies anytime. When she was climbing out the window, I’d have my pants open, and waving it around, you know? She’d squeal, and I’d say, “You just come on here and take care of your daddy’s big ole’ pecker.” She’d love me so much I couldn’t stand it. Sometimes we’d go up in some old barn and stay at each other all day. Suckin’. Fuckin’. And suckin’ some more. She got knocked up, too, wouldn’t you know. And then the other little girl of mine—Marny. I slipped in that little bitch the wrong time of the month. And she was just eight. The two of them, blowin’ up with their pappy’s accidents. Now I thought that was fine. But mama didn’t like it too much. She was about to drop another one herself. Then this waitress who worked down in the diner near the Shell Station started going around saying I was daddy to the one she was lugging. Now that was shit: I’d been sticking her regular, but so had six other guys. And I was at that party where, maybe, ten of us who was working on the road crew got into her back of the garage. But she just wanted to make trouble for me, and take advantage of the rumor going round that Bull was instant babies. So I moved a town over. And I met that guy your boss is after.

• 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 The Tides of Lust (1973)

  A pencil in his fist, the captain was writing in what looked like an accounting ledger. Someone brushed against him and he looked up. Lamplight raddled in the Negro’s neck stubble The captain stood, stepped around the table, stepped before the lamp so that all figures were blotted with his shadow. He stepped again. A fisherman yanked her leg aside. The captain, legs apart between her wider legs, stood with the twin catenary of his testicles in silhouette. He kneeled. The catenaries swung. Her crying balked, took a rhythm with his valleying spine, as it arched and straightened, where light spilled back and forth. She made a sound like gagging. The cramping muscles at his scrotal base made Robby gasp. Figures swayed in the lapping light to the boat’s sway. And Robby could not ponder what he watched for disbelief. Knuckling his eyes because his lids were propped so long, he saw another man had mounted the heaving woman, or another. The pressure lower than his belly he could not touch for pain. The gilded figures slipped Grinding the verdigrised sill, his chin and fingers grew sore. He sagged on the hull, eye tearing: A woman struck a black six-year-old in the belly. The child screamed and staggered toward the window while she came on, raging. Robby jerked back as brown buttocks slapped and flattened on the glass. The boy kept shrieking, jerked left, then slipping right, while she did something to him inside. “Hey, boy!” From deck the captain, arms folded on the rail, gazed down the side of the boat. Robby opened his mouth. What wanted to become speech dissolved. The fog drifted on his blunted tongue. A dog barked in the city. “Hey there, boy! What you doing out here tonight? Rumors going out what you got yourself into some trouble,” and laughter followed into the fog. Robby blinked against the chill. Night’s vapors coiled between them to blur the buck. “Some people are saying you messed up one of this town’s more respectable young ladies” Memories confused themselves in Robby’s mind. Something raged in him and would take no name. He stepped back again, trying to speak. He was still shivering. Something coursed through, leaving a burning in his joints, setting a slow rage in his belly. “Come on up here.” Robby stepped on the plank. His boot hit a cross rib and he stopped. Flecks of light sped the water. “You think it’s a good idea for you just to be hanging around like this?” The captain reached under his shirt to scratch. “We’ll be pulling out of here come dawn.” From among the houses came a fit of canine wailing. The captain looked up. Then his eyes returned to Robby “You going to come aboard, boy?” Robby stepped on the boat. “What . . .” and had to back off the word to get voice. “. . . what do you want me to do . . . Captain.” The captain frowned.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Well, maybe not those sad ladies who give their phone numbers out to strangers. What losers. I stuff the slips of paper in the car ashtray. Inside, with my small family abed, I pour my tumbler of whiskey and drink it on the back porch. Before staggering upstairs to pass out, I fix a second, since I’ll invariably wake around two or three, unable to cork off again without a few swallows. The next morning I take the half-empty tumbler of whiskey before grabbing Dev to piggyback downstairs. There, standing over the sink, I look at the watery drink and say to myself—as I do every morning—Seems wrong to pour it out. So I swill down those dregs. Only this time I hear my own voice from the night before, righteously claiming I never took a morning drink. It’s the first lie I caught myself in. In fact, I never poured the drink. Just drank it. It’s a snippet of a revelation, Dev’s solid weight on my hip the only force cementing me to earth. I feel flying through me like a hard-hit ball David’s phrase; I have a disease whose defining symptom is believing you don’t have a disease...but I’m not ready to stop listening to the screwed-up inner voice that’s been ordering me around for a lifetime. My head thinks it can kill me—as one lady at the meeting said—and go on living without me.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  They were laughing. “Hold him there—yeah, keep his head back. Look at him take that stuff right down!” “He don’t look like he likes that at all—!” “You better swallow, boy, or you gonna drown in nigger piss!” Fingers in his mouth—one hand over his nose, one pulling down over his chin—kept his teeth apart. “Stick it right on in. Right on down.” Robby got one hand loose and struck at the canvas covered legs. Iron behind the cloth. He thought he was falling, slapped the ground to balance. A bare foot pinned his hand, bruising it. “Hey, look at this cocksucker—” He couldn’t get breath. “You better swallow, or you gonna die—” He couldn’t swallow for gagging. His tongue blunted on the flesh that flooded him. One of them wiped his hands over his face—so hard it hurt—and he could see: a big buckle and splattered cloth, very near. Then the ridged black belly, small head far away. But grinning. The nigger swung his hand—still grinning—and Robby’s ear clanged with the smack. One eye went blazing blind. But jarred into him. He got one gasp without taking in water. The knuckles came back the other way. With the pain, urine flushed his eyes. He reeled under their hands and his hand was still clamped on the ground. He swallowed. When they dropped him he went down clutching at their ankles. His face rolled over a foot. As he knuckled his eyes, toes struck his cheek. He curled on his side. Glancing up, he saw a fist slide up a dick. “Motherfucker—” the fisherman drawled, puckered his lips to a prune. He kicked again. Robby gaped with pain. The fisherman spat. Robby swallowed out of surprise: froth, and thicker than froth. He rolled his head aside, while their laughter unraveled. “Come on, nigger! This is the third white face you been in tonight.” “We better get on back to Proctor, before he gets where he’s goin’.” “Did me good to see him drink it down!” “Shit, you’d a’ thought that son of a bitch didn’t like it none, hey?” “He sure gonna feel funny in a little while when that stuff hits!” They laughed, and the laughter moved up the bank. Robby scrubbed his palm on his mouth. He got to his knees. His jaw hurt. He pulled his wet shirt from his chest, let it flop back. He pulled the thigh of his pants out with his fingertips. He stood, frowning. His left foot was awash in his shoe. He walked up the bank from under the dock. He slipped once, and barked a curse. His voice died quivering. He gained the concrete, looked along the boats; looked down at himself. Looked across the street.

• 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.