I Pass Like Night

Jonathan Ames teeters somewhere between clarity and overwhelming perversion, with a nod in there somewhere to minimalism. Alexander Vine, the protagonist of I Pass Like Night, is an omnivorous sex addict and an eager confidant of the friendly, lawless inhabitants of late-night Manhattan. In this relatively short novel, Ames gives us a jumbled history of Alexander's increasingly amoral life. Amid the stories of prostitution, alcoholism, and accidental homosexuality, Alexander emerges as a very human, albeit very confused, 20-something.

"And I thought to myself, the most sobering thing in the world is to look in the mirror and see how ugly you really are."

"He says that with all the whores on the street that he feels like he's in a candy store or toy department of women."

"During these last few weeks the clouds had been storing up poisons like an alcoholic's liver, and I didn't want to be caught underneath it now that it had been sliced open."

"For years I had been looking for a way to describe how I felt, and she had put it so perfectly, so simply: gutted like a fish."
"A queasy feeling came over me that has marked almost every erotic experience I've ever had."

"I walked towards Delancey and a bum was passed out, lying beside a building, and I saw that he had no arms and there was a can tied around his neck for money. I got to the corner and waited for the light to change and I thought to myself, men without hands can't really beg."

"That's how it began, but how it ended I don't really remember because there was no last time, like a first time, just a slow fade."

"But I'm clean now. All my diseases are gone and I'm a lot more careful these days. I still do have some small scars, but you can't see them at night, in the dark, in my bed."

"And sometimes I feel sorry for my penis, I make it do things it probably doesn't want to do, but it obliges anyways, and must think that everything is for a higher purpose."

"I said goodbye and left them chattering and complaining, like people everywhere that's what they do best."

"I thought of all the people I'd slept with in my life, all the bodies I'd touched, and how they would fill the whole room."

"But I knew she'd come back in a few days, it's a vicious cycle, and I wondered to myself, 'Why does she want me? Can't she see what I am?'"

"So I grew up in a state of constant preparation for disaster."

"The general rule for self preservation that was taught to me is this: Expect the worst and maybe it won't happen to you."

"Then other times she tells me about the pills she keeps in her top drawer 'just in case,' and how knowing the pills are there gives her a sense of security. She says things like that and I start feeling comfortable like I'm on common ground again because she's like all the other girls I've known, semi-suicidal."

"It was very quiet and I listened and my body was like a house and I could hear different doors slamming."

"I was sitting there and sort of hoping that somebody I knew would walk by, but it was almost three o'clock and I don't know many people."

"My head spun a little from the booze, but I was ready."

"All over my body, in my lower back, in my hands, in my stomach, along the shelf of my hips, in my arms, are bags and boxes of hates and angers, and that night in front of the boy's house is down there somewhere, making little cancers maybe, but it's closed tight for now. Thought that first night it leaked a little while I rode my bike and punished my legs on the hills and hated my town and hated all the ugly houses."

"I saw him less and less frequently, but we still went to an occasional movie or diner and I never told him once how I felt. It went on like that for a year and a half and I always thought it would change, that one day in the same way that it somehow had disappeared, it would come back and we'd be best friends again. So I hung on to whatever time he gave me and when you're wrapped up in it you think you're floating, but really I was just drowning more."

"I had loved him, but I didn't know how to love, and so he had always hated me and when he was ready he left me. And he was right to do it."

"...I know in my mind for the first time in my life--I've never believed that I would die. I've never even believed anybody else has died."

"I'm always looking for the person who replaces me, who thinks the things I do, who fills in for me when I'm not there. I know there is someone younger than me doing what I did and someone older doing what I will do, and someone my age being just like me."

"Then I felt something cold on my hip and I shivered with revulsion, because I'd fallen asleep and then woken up and remembered what we'd just done. I had been lost in the warm blankets and the sounds of the street outside, but then I heard her swallow and then felt the liquid and I knew we had these horrible bodies with holes and fluids and I was hating myself."