Oop!There had been a time in high school, see, when I wrestled with the possibility that I might be gay, a torturous six-month culmination of years of unpopularity and girllessness. At night I lay in bed and coolly informed myself that I was gay and that I had better get used to it. The locker room became a place of torment, full of exposed male genitalia that seemed to taunt me with my failure to avoid glancing at them, for a fraction of a second that might have seemed accidental but was, I recognized, a bitter symptom of my perversion. Bursting with typical fourteen-year-old desire, I attempted to focus it in succession on the thought of every boy I know, hoping to find some outlet for my horniness, even if it had to be perverted, secret, and doomed to disappointment. Without exception these attempts failed to produce anything but bemusement, if not actual disgust.
This crisis of self-esteem had been abruptly dispelled by the advent of Julie Lefkowitz, followed swiftly by her sister Robin, and then Sharon Horne and little Rose Fagan and Jennifer Shaeffer; but I never forgot my period of profound sexual doubt. Once in a while I would meet an enthralling man who shook, dimly but perceptibly, the foundations laid by Julie Lefkowitz, and I would wonder, just for a moment, by what whim of fate I had decided that I was not a homosexual.
- Michael Chabon,
The Mysteries of PittsburghI had just come through the little fishing village of Sausalito, and the first thing I said was, "There must be a lot of Italians in Sausalito."
"There must be a lot of Italians in Sausalito!" [Remi] shouted at the top of his lungs. "Aaaaah!" He pounded himself, he fell on the bed, he almost rolled on the floor. "Did you hear what Paradise said? There must be a lot of Italians in Sausalito? Aaaah-haaa! Hoo! Wow! Whee!" He got red as a beet, laughing. "Oh, you slay me, Paradise, you're the funniest man in the world, and here you are, you finally got here, he came in through the window, you saw him, Lee Ann, he followed instructions and came in through the window. Aaah! Hooo!"
The strange thing was that next door to Remi lived a Negro called Mr. Snow whose laugh, I swear on the Bible, was positively and finally the one greatest laugh in all this world. This Mr. Snow began his laugh from the supper table when his old wife said something casual; he got up, apparently choking, leaned on the wall, looked up to heaven, and started; he staggered through the door, leaning on neighbor's walls; he was drunk with it, he reeled throughout Mill City in the shadows, raising his whooping triumphant call to the demon god that must have prodded him to do it. I don't know if he ever finished supper. There's a possibility that Remi, without knowing it, was picking up from this amazing man, Mr. Snow. And though Remi was having worklife problems and bad lovelife with a sharp-tongued woman, he at least had learned to laugh almost better than anyone in the world, and I saw all the fun we were going to have in Frisco.
- Jack Kerouac,
On the RoadLong nights simply thinking about the usefulness of that little wire scourer, those little yellow copper things you buy in supermarkets for 10 cents, all to me infinitely more interesting than the stupid and senseless "Steppenwolf" novel in the shack which I read with a shrug, this old fart reflecting the "conformity" of today and all the while he thought he was a big Nietzsche, old imitator of Dostoevsky 50 years too late (he feels tormented in a "personal hell" he calls it because he doesnt like what other people like!)----Better at noon to watch the orange and black Princeton colors on the wings of a butterfly----Best to go hear the sound of the sea at night on the shore.
- Jack Kerouac,
Big SurWhen we were fourteen, Julie Eisenman and I searched Lake Commonstock together for buried treasure. We dove down as far as we could go and extended our hands into the ropy seaweed. We pulled up shells, shoes, beer bottles older children had tossed into the water. Once, when we were coming out of the water, I gave her a white stone I’d found. She kissed me on the mouth and hugged me so that I could feel her stomach bare against my stomach. "Do you want to come over?" she asked. "Maybe later," I said, afraid that she wanted something bright and terrible from me. "Come tonight." She waved to me from the porch and I could see her ribs move in and out with her breathing. I walked home on the side of the road, trying to make my feet hurt by pressing them against the sharp sides of stones. I didn’t go that night, because I was afraid to sneak out of my house, afraid to walk the lake’s edge in darkness, afraid of what would happen if I went to her.
- Paul LaFarge, "The Observers"
(My apologies.)
