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The Bribe

Grace and I had agreed to pick up Paul at the airport in Guatemala City. Suzie, Paul’s girlfriend and our fellow Peace Corps volunteer, had to build chicken coops in a village near Santiago and couldn’t leave in time to meet him, so she’d asked us to go in her place.

Sunbeams

The sex that is presented to us in everyday culture feels strange to me; its images are fragments, lifeless, removed from normal experience. Real sex, the sex in our cells and in the space between our neurons, leaks out and gets into things and stains our vision and colors our lives.

Sallie Tisdale

The Beautiful Woman And The Fear Of God

I am convinced, however, that the sexual problems of many middle-aged men are the symptoms of a spiritual crisis that has nothing to do with sex. Men are rummaging around in their small rooms looking for the solution — younger women, better gadgets, subtler techniques — when the real answer is outside the room altogether. It is a matter of discovering what sexual energy really is, something like what Roger Corless meant when he said that anything you do with your deepest energy is a sexual act. It is a matter not of looking for sex in new places but of seeing that sex is everywhere.

Darkness Club

Before And After

Every day of the month before I committed suicide, I listened to Pink Floyd’s The Wall and was perfectly happy. It focused the mind wonderfully to know that, barring a miracle, in four weeks, then three, then two, I would no longer exist.

Selected Poems

Japanese Food

My friend Howard doesn’t want me to know that he’s dying. He hates all the movies and books and plays about AIDS, especially what happens at the end. He says they turn something real into a sappy, pointless melodrama. But that’s not why he hasn’t told me.

Stage Fright

A spelling bee, a lesson about survival, a couples-only swingers’ club

A Finger On The Page

Everyone washes too much in this country. They wash their babies too much, as well. The babies don’t smell of milk and waste but perfume and powder. At the day-care center where I work, some parents back away from me because I smell like a real person.

Bikini

In 1960 I was one of the few people I knew who owned a bikini. They had been around for a while but were still considered fairly risqué. Mine was pink, was made of cotton, and tied around the neck.