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Only when the nurse deployed the phrase privy privacy, without any sense of irony, did I find there was still enough of the teenager in me to snicker.
“The release of the want of the want of release. Though, as it turns out, libido was the last defense I had.”
“A young hoodlum who let himself be taken by the pimps—in order to steal their ego. That’s Sartre, describing Jean Genet.” “That’s right. That’s exactly right, I wanted to steal your ego. God, I was miserable then. Mortified by my own body. I wanted to leap up out of my skin. I wanted to know things.”
“And perhaps, nene, you romanticized it all?” “What all?” “Well, the failure. The sharp slick thing you were allowing yourself to become. The very idea of the hoodlum homosexual.”
“How about you tell me one thing about your mother.” “Now?” “For context.” “But we keep going backward.” “Please. Just one thing. Make it terrible.”
If everything stayed the same, you wouldn’t have cause for your precious nostalgia, nene.)
And there are so many ways to inflect that phrase, aren’t there, to call someone little girl, to ask what are you doing here? But in my child’s mind, he asked her very kindly, very kindly indeed, with the benevolence, concern, and gentle eroticism one might find in a fairy tale. I looked for him everywhere.”
Forty and forty is a kind of shorthand, a catchall, for a time of trial and tribulation. The forty days and forty nights of Moses fasting in the desert. Of Moses receiving God’s law on Mount Sinai. Of Jesus, fasting in the desert.” “The flood, too, right? It rained for forty nights and forty days?” “The time span of purification. And in Sodom, too, when Abraham begs God to spare the city, the Lord cuts a deal. He says to Abraham, If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes. But Abraham haggles. Peradventure there shall lack five of the
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She never barked, because she couldn’t; she had been bred not to bark, but barks lived inside her,
If I’m nostalgic, it’s not because I was happy in those precarious years.
In our attachments, whether to objects or others, there exists a continual fluctuation of our energies. We wish to possess, to be possessed, and to be relieved of our possessions all at once. The hoarder solves the problem of value and attachment by holding on. The chronic loser lets it all go.
Still, how will the animals know he arrived safely? Why, I’ll laugh like you, Hyena, says the boy. Of course. And we leave the story here, the boy back with his family, and the animals eager to get back to the relative safety of the watering hole, but waiting, anxiously, for the sign from the boy. And then they hear it, unmistakable, the mark of the pansy, fearless; that high and happy bark; that scavenger’s yelp. That queer cry of recognition, the unmistakable laugh of the hyena.”
“My friends and I used to play a game called Two Truths and a Lie—but the trick was just to tell three lies, or three true things; the trick was to let no one ever really figure you out: Take my picture. Be my father. Let me stay right here.
“You walk around with this huge fucking neon sign above your head and this arrow pointing down at you, like those signs in front of motels that say ROOMS AVAILABLE, except your sign says SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAPPENED TO ME, and you keep that sign all lit up like that above you, and you want people to ask, you want the whole fucking world to feel sorry for you, but no matter how much you tell it, no one’s ever going to understand, and it’s never going to be enough.”
because of the way he recited them, the repetition, similar to the way one prays on the rosary. “What thou lovest well remains … the rest is dross … What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee … What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage … What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee…” And of course, from that same canto come the lines with which he’d tease me: “Pull down thy vanity … I say pull down!”
