Novelists From The United States

"[Henry, to Rod] "Hell's not a place, Rod, it's something people do to each other.""

"[Henry] "...when you start running from yourself, you end up in some pretty dark places.""

"[Asuras] "There are means people and there are ends people. The means people create distinctions among means and call it morality. The ends people understand that in this world, in this system we're born into, anything that gets you what you want is a good thing.""

"[Donati] "You couldn't have planned a worse place to put a city than LA.""

"[Alex] Big ideas don't pay the rent."

"[Donati] "You see why I don't advertise I'm gay?" "No, not exactly, Nick." "Because I don't want to be confused with people like Bob." He tossed back his drink. "Drag queens, leather queens, all those sick fucks who parade around and make it impossible for the rest of us to have normal lives.""

"[Henry] Life is a kind of exile and we all long to go home. Who said that?"

"[Inez] "...If you consort with lowlifes you've got to expect complications.""

"[Alex] "I never knew how many ways there were to fail until I moved here.""

"[Henry Rios] "We never know anyone as well as we think we do.""

"Greed had always seemed to me the most self-defeating of vices, because one cannot own anything permanently: we have, at most, a life tenancy in our possessions. But I suppose the fulfilment was in the acquisition and maybe, too, someone who'd been tossed around by life needed the cosseting that money and things provide."

"It was sometimes easier to read the future from the entrails of a cat than get a fix on what a judge was thinking, and Torres-Jones was particularly hard to get a handle on."

"[Josh Mandel] "Most things people care about are silly. They don't think about the ones that matter.""

"[Zack Bowen] "Damn, it's tough being a fag. People hate you who don't even know you, and the ones who know you, they're worse.""

"It really was a brutal place, Los Angeles, less a city than a collection of hostile villages united only in their mutual suspicion of each other and a susceptibility to disasters, natural and otherwise. Fires, floods, riots and earthquakes; it was looking more and more like Armageddon-by-the-Pacific."

"The Abbey was on Robertson, just below Santa Monica, on the edge of Boys' Town. Low brick buildings housed cafes, clothing stores, coffee houses and watch repair shops that rubbed elbows with gay clubs and sex shops. These establishments catered to hordes of the beautiful young gay men who lived in the big apartment complexes that lined the side streets or who drove in from all over Southern California on weekend nights. I seldom ventured there, because it reminded me of San Francisco in the '70s, when I was a boy just coming out and how out of place I'd felt among the big-muscled boys who cruised each other with cold assessment. Twenty years later, only the faces and the clothes had changed; the air was still charged with the brutal calculation of lust. And beneath that was the claustrophobia of a ghetto, of fearful people looking out at the world from behind invisible fences."

"[Henry Rios] I went down to my car, got in and sat, waiting for something to happen, some tidal wave of grief or anger to overwhelm me, but all I felt was a kind of dazed fatigue. It was the mental emptiness of effort I used to feel when I was a distance runner on my high school track team, and everything got reduced to putting one foot in front of the other. What was I then, fifteen, sixteen, pounding the dirt path along the river that ran through my home town? I sought refuge in that emptiness from my first awareness that I was different from other boys. What had Chris told me about his own adolescence, that he didn't want to be different? I didn't, either. I watched my classmates being initiated into the world of men and women where everything was planned and the outcomes known: marriage, children, family. That world was closed to me. I didn't have a plan, didn't know where I would end up or with whom. So I ran, mile after mile, until my body ached and my mind went blank. What happened is that I realised I could not outrun this thing. I remember that day, staggering along the path after a stupendous effort, darkness falling in the summer sky, racked with the dry heaves, gasping "I'm a queer," the only word I knew for my condition. I was full of fear and I felt completely alone, but I could not deny the truth and there was a kind of relief in that. I had now reached the same point with Josh's disease. I couldn't outrun it."

"[Henry Rios] I said a prayer, always the same prayer. Two words. Help us."

"[Detective McBeth] "Being out of the closet is a luxury that many gay people can't afford. Maybe you can't understand that, but it's something I think about.""

"And they drank. They drank to wash down the slights they endured by day and to enlarge small lives which became heroic in alcohol-glazed rumination, but at their cores the fathers knew the full measure of their unimportance and, so, finally, they drank to quiet the rage. But the rage would not be completely calmed. How could it? The church told them their reward would be in the next life, but this is small consolation for the back-breaking labors of the present, the years of enforced humility. When the rage exploded, they struck out at the only ones over whom they had any power: wives, sons, daughters, particularly the sons in whom they saw their own lost youths. The sons bore the blows and absorbed the rage."

"Downstairs, in the bleak cafeteria, a crazy woman sat at a table carrying on an animated conversation with someone who wasn't there. The crazy woman got up and shook hands with the air."

"[Edith] "If you tell a child he's bad long enough and often enough, he will act it out.""

"He hoisted himself up to the ledge of the pool, the water running streams down his thin, hard body. "I came out here from Tennessee to go to school, a long time ago. I was eighteen and pretty and there wasn't anything I wouldn't do in bed. I had a lot of friends." He pushed wet hair from his forehead. "Thing is, you don't stay young and pretty forever. It began to take more and more booze to keep up the illusion, not that anybody but me was fooled. The friends drifted off, the party moved on, and I woke up one morning and I was thirty-one, broke and a drunk.""

"Having had to work twice as hard for what he deserved on merit alone, he'd developed a kind of rage, like an extra set of muscles, propelling him through life. The rage never went away. There was never enough to reward you for what you had suffered. And you never, ever, forgot you were an outsider, no matter how expensive your suits."

"As far as I was concerned, the Catholic Church was just another totalitarian political entity, like the Communist Party or IBM, but I had to admit, it put on a good show. I watched the theatrics unfold."

"It was the mystery of my sexual nature that a body which was the mirror image of mine could be so compelling and feel so unfamiliar. When I was younger, it had seemed urgent to unravel this mystery because I believed that if it could be explained, the haters would stop hating us. Now I believed that they had no more right to an explanation about me than I did about them and, in any case, they would find other reasons to hate. Now I was simply grateful for his body beside me, known and unknown."

"[Josh] "Just listen to me. I don't want to die, Henry. I want to be like everyone else. I want my seventy-five years or whatever, but I know I'm not going to have them and it makes me crazy." He tipped his head back and swallowed hard. "I can't help resenting you. You're going to be alive after I'm dead and you'll find someone else." He drew a deep breath. "It's not fair. I had to get away from you. I had to get away from my own resentment.""

"[Henry, to the therapist] "You people always end up wanting to talk about mommy and daddy," I said, intending a joke, but it was more hostile than funny."

"[Henry Rios, with Raymond Reynolds, therapist] "Somewhere along the line, I had died." "What does that mean, Henry?" he inquired in his mild voice. "The thing that makes us human, the recognition of being alive, I had lost that. I drowned it in bourbon and kept myself so busy with work that I hadn't even noticed until that moment.""

"It was not quiet in my head."

"[Chuck Sweeny] "Times change, we change with 'em.""

"I walked over to the railing and watched the traffic stream up and down the boulevard. A blond in a Jeep cruised by slowly, his cassette player blaring a disco tune from the seventies. Ah, the hunt, I thought, remembering the nights I had stood in San Francisco bars listening to that same song while I ingested a little liquid courage. Or, rather, a lot of liquid courage. Most nights I would stagger out alone and take the train back to school. Once in a while someone would pick me up, or I would pick him up, and I would toil in a stranger's bed for a few hours, trying to get out of my skin by going through his. I imagined that I was having fun, and sometimes I was, but not nearly often enough."

"[Henry, with Katherine Paris] She looked away from me. A moment later she said, "I have never understood homosexuality. I can't picture what you men do with each other." "I could tell you but it would completely miss the point.""

"[Gus Peña] "It's time for me to take care of me.""

"He was a great and impartial hater; anyone different from him became an object of his contempt."

"A child's sexual innocence isn't moral, it's literal: he has no context for it. From the adult who uses him sexually, he learns a context"

"[Mr Hendricksen, a high school principal, with Henry Rios] "Useta be there were a lot more people, with the braceros and all," he said. "Now all the big farms are mechanised and they don't need as many workers. Plus, a lot of the canneries have shut down. We're drying up. We've closed classrooms." "What about those bunkers outside?" He swept crumbs from his shirt front. "They went up in the sixties when the place was packed with kids." He squinted at me. "I guess that woulda been your generation, Mr Rios. The whole bunch of you were smart-ass troublemakers and I never thought I'd miss those days, but I do." He poured me more coffee. "You kids were alive. Nowadays, the students, they seemed kinda depressed." "It's a harder world to be young in," I said."

"[Henry Rios, with Kevin Reilly] "Sometimes I can't believe what people do to each other." "Believe it," he said. "There's nothing that hasn't been done by someone to someone. People settling scores is what keeps us in business.""

"I had loved so infrequently I felt a debt to those whom I had, for the reprieve from solitude."

"[Henry] I shrugged. "Being born into my family was like being thrown into an accident.""

"I didn't know what else to say. Moments like this brought home to me that no matter how well I thought I knew him, how much I loved him, we were on different sides of the fence that separated the infected from the uninfected. I could see a little way over to his side, but he lived there."

"[Henry Rios, with Josh] "I think someone's at the door." "I'll see who it is." "If it's the grim reaper, tell him he's a couple of years early.""

"[Paul Windsor, with Henry Rios] Holding up a red M&M, he added, "I thought they'd stopped making these." "Someone started a letter-writing campaign and got the candy company to start making them again." I opened a 7-Up and took a swig. It was as warm and thick as the air in the room. "It's funny what people get themselves worked up about.""

"[Ben Vega, with Henry Rios] "How can you defend a guy like that?" "If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me that question I'd be retired by now," I replied. "So do you really want an answer or were you just asking so you can feel superior to me?" Startled, but game, Vega said, "Yeah, I want an answer. Really." "Well, the answer changes depending on the case," I replied. "Sometimes I defend someone because I think he deserves a break,, or maybe just because I like him. And sometimes I do it because, whatever the guy's done, worse has been done to him." I grinned. "And sometimes I do it for money. And sometimes I do it because no one else will. Like this case.""

"[Henry Rios] It has never taken much for me to dislike a cop. My automatic assumption that most of them are assholes is seldom disappointed."

"After talking to Mark, I'd spent much of the night in the kind of "what if" ruminations that served no particular purpose except to depress me."

"[Henry Rios] "I acquired my values through trial and error." What I'd meant when I told Paul my values were acquired through trial and error was that they were learned, not given, and came out of my own experience."

"[Henry Rios, to Paul Windsor] "Society is a conspiracy and everyone who's different is its target.""

"Lips pursed, Sara moved swiftly and rudely through the crowd of midday shoppers as we crossed the square. Sara'd been thin as a girl, but no more. Not quite fat, but the extra weight she carried blurred her features. Pouches of flesh had gathered beneath her eyes and her chin. Damp circles stained her armpits and the seat of her dress was deeply wrinkled. Her makeup was hit-and-miss and she had the look of someone who no longer cared much about her appearance."

"[Henry Rios, with Elena] The heat had become a bit denser and the light a little dustier as the fragrant morning waned. Birds called from the surrounding trees and the low burble of water sounded from the stream that ran through Elena's property. "This is heaven," I said, opening the car door. She smiled, deepening the lines around her mouth. "Have you ever read Primo Levi?" "No." "He has a passage in his book about concentration camp survivors―to the effect that those who have once been tortured go on being tortured. Heaven's not possible for people like that.""