More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
On September 15th, 1981, a boy named Jack Sawyer stood where the water and land come together, hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking out at the steady Atlantic.
His mother was moving him through the world, twitching him from place to place; but what moved his mother?
ran all racket and roar
Jack Sawyer at twelve was a being who required things to do, and the noiseless passivity of these days, after the hubbub of Manhattan, had confused and undone him in some basic way.
The silence was as gray as the air—as deadly as the growing circles under her eyes.
how could one old black man he’d just met solve any of his problems?
Magical negro
and at the end all there may be is the stupid, unthinking scream of living tissue.
solid comfortable Uncle Tommy Woodbine, who was supposed to have been one of his guardians—a strong wall against trouble and confusion—crumpled and dead on La Cienega Boulevard, his teeth like popcorn twenty feet away in the gutter.
They smiled at each other, and Jack could not ever remember a need to cry so badly, or remember loving her so much.
All he could not say weighed in his chest.
The tears hurt, but he sensed the terror would kill him if he did not cry it out.
Jack put his hot, swollen face against Speedy’s thin shirt, smelling the man’s smell—something like Old Spice, something like cinnamon, something like books that no one has taken out of the library in a long time. Good smells, comforting smells.
“That’s why I got me some magic juice. This stuff is special.” Speedy spoke this last in tones that were almost reverential.
Tommy was now a homosexual. Probably he’d call himself gay. And that made everything easier—in the end, it even made it easier to get rid of Tommy.
Because queers are always getting killed, aren’t they? And did anybody really want a two-hundred-and-ten-pound pansy responsible for bringing up a teenage boy?
even the most brightly dressed people Jack saw couldn’t hold a candle to some of the dandies he had seen inside the pavillion),
bet my dad dreamed deep a lot. And I’ll bet Uncle Morgan almost never does.
They live in a mystery, these people live in a mystery. It’s joy that holds them up. That was what mattered.
profligate
everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow.
He had been groped before, certainly—in movie theaters, mostly, but there had been the men’s-shop clerk in North Hollywood who had cheerfully offered to blow him in a changing booth (and when Jack told him no thanks, the clerk said, “Fine, now try on the blue blazer, okay?”). These were annoyances a good-looking twelve-year-old boy in Los Angeles simply learned to put up with, the way a pretty woman learns to put up with being groped occasionally on the subway. You eventually find a way to cope without letting it spoil your whole day. The deliberate passes, such as the one this Ferguson was
...more
This is some problematic shit.
Jack had a good idea who would come through like this, like a rape in progress.
“You fucking queers.”
I’LL BE A SUNBEAM FOR JESUS.
“I love you, Jacky.” “I love you, too, Wolf,” Jack said. “Right here and now.”
That’s some sweet-ass shit.
When he jerked his eyes away, Jack felt the absence of a Wolf-hand folding itself around his. Now that he missed his friend so completely, the memory of his impatience with Wolf shamed him, brought the blood to his face. He had thought about abandoning Wolf more times than he could count.
don’t know what I do think, actually, but I’m sure you’re not telling me deliberate lies.”
good novels and stories sometimes carried Jack away . . . the good ones, he thought, were almost as good as the Daydreams, and each mapped out its own version of the Territories.
wrote another book report which contained all the zeal and fire of a hungover pathologist’s post-mortem on a traffic accident victim.
when that happens, Richard rejects fantasy for good and all; Richard negates fantasy; Richard refuses to deal with fantasy, or treat with it, or compromise with it. He has, quite simply, Had Enough, Forever.
for a moment everything in him seemed clear and full of radiance; for a moment everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow.
It was like those few times, he thought (Orris thought) when a man and woman achieve orgasm at the exact same instant and die in sex together.
Poundcake
He wished he could take Richard’s hand. Then he thought, Well, why not? and moved his hand along the bench until he encountered his friend’s rather grubby, clammy paw. He closed his fingers around it.
That’s some cute shit
His feeling that the end—some sort of end—was now close had never been stronger.
And yet theres still like 35% of the book left
And now Morgan was coming again—not flipping over but bludgeoning his way through, raping his way in.
“All the women I played knew how to fuck, but not one of them knew how to fart,”
Jack looked like . . . like a hero. That was all. He looked like a dirty, dishevelled, outrageously youthful hero, wrong for the role on almost every count, but undeniably still a hero.
You don’t own a thing unless you can give it up, what does it profit a man, it profits him nothing, it profits him zilch,
Here at the end of day; here at sunset with color fanning up from the western sky in glory. Here: Right here and now.
Not thinking, Jack came back in for a moment and kissed Richard’s cheek. Richard put his arms around Jack’s neck for a moment, and hugged fiercely.
Homosocial moment
From the open seam in the Talisman a wondrous odor spilled out with the gray-golden cloud, an odor sweet and unsweet, of flowers and earth, wholly good, yeasty; a smell of birth, Jack thought,
Vagina
he thought he would burst with feeling. He expanded. He breathed in light.
