Fiction

T. Coraghessan Boyle has written sixteen books of fiction, including After the Plague, Drop City, and The Inner Circle, which is forthcoming from Viking Penguin in September 2004, and from which “Shorty’s Paradise” is excerpted. Among Boyle’s many literary honors are several O. Henry Prizes, a PEN/Faulkner Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Boyle has taught in the English Department of the University of Southern California since 1978 and lives near Santa Barbara, California, with his family. Photo by Pablo Campos.

Shorty’s Paradise

A Story

by T. Coraghessan Boyle
(AUTHOR’S NOTE: THE ACTION TAKES PLACE IN 1940 AND CONCERNS
THE SEX RESEARCH OF DR. ALFRED C. KINSEY AND HIS ASSOCIATE,
THE FICTIONAL JOHN MILK.)


Over the course of the next two months, Prok was in increasing demand as a lecturer, and we began, of necessity, to step up our travel schedule. Word had gotten around. It seemed that every civic group, private school, and university in a five-hundred-mile radius wanted him to appear, and at this stage, Prok never turned down an invitation. Nor did he charge a fee, even going so far as to pay travelling expenses out of his ow n pocket, though his first fledgling grants from the National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation helped cover him here—as they did with my salary as his first full-time employee.

The routine was the same as always—Prok would find himself in a hall somewhere, the crowd already gathered, and he would lecture with his usual frankness on previously taboo subjects and then ask for volunteers—friends of the research, he’d begun to call them—to step forward and have their histories taken. When we weren’t in his office, working out our tabulations, curves, and correlation charts, we were off on the road, collecting data, because, as Prok said, over and over, you could never have enough data.

Want to read the rest?
Please login.
New to Narrative? sign up.
It's easy and free.
The password field is case sensitive. Account & Password Help.
Joining Narrative gives you FREE access to thousands of stories, poems and essays. It’s easy:
PLEASE ENTER A VALID EMAIL ADDRESS.
PLEASE NOTE: We are discontinuing our support of Microsoft-related addresses, including msn.com, live.com, outlook.com, and hotmail.com, and we ask that you use an alternative address, such as gmail.com, yahoo.com, fastmail.com, comcast.net, verizon.com, icloud.com, or other.

We have found Microsoft-related email addresses to be sometimes inconsistent in terms of delivering messages, and we want to make sure that you can access your account and reliably receive messages that you have requested.
Email Preferences
Email Preferences