by Barry Hannah
He was right about Natalie Wood. I had seen her once in Rebel Without a Cause but ignored her in favor of Dean. In West Side Story, though, as she was dancing and singing, and especially when she performed “Somewhere” amidst the gang horror of New York, I teared up and wanted her more than anything before in my life. She was it, tripled. Please wouldn’t she wait until I got famous and rich, and got some more height? Harold stood there, forever, as the credits rolled at the end. He seemed to be memorizing the name of every member who’d even carried a mop in the studio. I was smitten, looking down at the floor I was so charged, and still riding on that New York music.
We went to Baton Rouge to sleep at a Holiday Inn—very new and seeming swankier then—but on the way down Harold said maybe he should tell me this was a Negro production of Godot we were going to the next night.
“You’re kidding. This Beckett wrote for Negroes?”
“Grow up. He wrote for man, little man.”
“Oh. Well, sure.”
You would not believe how condescending and polite I was in that audience of Negroes in suits. The play was riveting and strange to me, and I thought maybe I was one of the few not getting it, just here and there a dose of sense. Nobody laughed, and I don’t know at all about the quality of the production. But it was a quiet smiling scandal that we were here at all, and I was glad to hear Harold’s earnest sighs now and again when a point of confusion and futility—I got that—was made. I felt very allied to the culture-hip scene. We were not going to put up with any racists once we were outside the theater either, me and my Negro friends, hearkening in our suits—goddamnit, let there be trouble. Our very class and righteousness would blow them away.
Out in the foyer, digging the crowd with Harold, I felt very promoted in my suit and Ivy League haircut, only I wanted a goatee very badly. Harold had pulled off to a wall for a smoke. I also wanted to say something on the mark.
“Way out, very. But really, how many of them you think really got it, Hare?”
He was disgusted, eyes closed in smoke.
“You tit. You little tits go right from blind ignorance to cynicism, never feeling a damned thing.”
“No, no, I feel. Miles Davis is my man.”
I was rescued by the appearance of the first great public faggot I’d ever witnessed. This black thing, tall and skinny as a drum major, was leading a trio of admirers out of the auditorium, hands curling and thrown out from his chest, squealing like a mule on fire, and dressed in something mauve and body-fit with a red necktie on it.
I smiled across the way at Harold, who had distanced himself, checked the near-empty theater, and began doing the pantomime I had learned off Ray Wiley, a worldly child of the army base who claimed to have encountered many queers. I wet both forefingers, smoothed my eyebrows with them, and formed my mouth in an O with my lips covering the hole, then held my arms out as if in a flying tackle. We conceived of queers as sort of helpless roving linebackers apt to dive on you and bury their faces in your loins. Wiley told many happy stories about how these men were discovered in their act in army lounges and stomped senseless. You could also use burning naphtha to rout them.
“What in hell?” Harold hissed, flicking eyes around the precincts like a spy.
He came over and grabbed my arm very strongly for such a skinny creature. Harold wore a formless blue serge suit with a clip-on green tie on his flat collar like a salesman at a funeral. I don’t believe he owned a button-down. He had on those heavy black executive shoes too. I noticed him red-eyed. He’d been crying quietly about Godot. Just as I’d wept tinnily for Natalie Wood.
“Behave, fool. You’re not in your own pathetic little country. Something wonderful has happened here, and you’re totally unmarked by it.”
“No. I’m marked, Hare. Truly marked, I swear. It was all there, man, straight on.”
“That and Our Town are the dramas of the century. Now you’ve seen both of them, thanks to me. What do you get from them? Zero. Out here queer-baiting. My God, you remind me of all those wry husbands dragged to the theater by their wives. Not a snowball’s chance in hell.”
“Look, man, I got something from it, all right? I only wish Natalie Wood was in it.”
Harold had pushed too far and I went sullen, out to his hopelessly square car, which looked even more like the grounded rocket of a very confused small nation. I thought about how stern old Harold was a great hypocrite, really, him with his album and glue-on straw from mouth to girl. The Studebaker left the campus with its weak hissing. He wouldn’t let it go.
“You’re not even up to sophomoric yet, is your trouble, cat. Cats know things, they sense things. Young men like Elvis have left you light years behind.”
I got a thicker skin of the sullen around me. Oh yeah? What about your Asian women, the trolls you cultivate now? I wanted to say. What great sense was in that? And, and . . . Harold did not wear his heart on his sleeve. He wore it on his forehead, throbbing away at you. I had a mother to scold me already, thank you.
“If you were worthy, I’d take you out for a drink, a liqueur. That’s what your mother expects me to do, teach you to drink,” he suddenly said, picking up on the very mother thought in my head, flicking me, chums again, on the suit sleeve. “I’m sorry for growling, cat. Really.”
“Likoor? Liquor?”
On Harold’s patient directions, the amused bartender at the Holiday Inn made us a sort of booze snow cone with crème de menthe. I guess I was so healthy and unpolluted, I felt it immediately, my first drink, or suck. I lit up like a pink sponge. All the world seemed at my feet, and I could barely stand the joy of Godot, Natalie Wood, and Harold in it at the same time. Even the city name, Baton Rouge, was vastly hip. Red stick, red stick. Very way out. Life was a long wonderful thing. It was so good you expected some official to show up and cancel it.
I tried to impress Harold with scandals I knew of myself, and told him about a shooting on a town square down south. A man had killed two policemen with a shotgun and gone home to threaten his own family, whereupon his oldest son ran him against a house with a truck and killed his own father with a .22, nine shots, the father yelling “Oh my God!” over and over. At the end, the son threw the pistol on the ground and said, “Daddy, why’d you make me do it? You knew I loved you.”
“No, no. That’s . . . just baroque misery. So beastly obvious. Nothing but low, mean, stunned feelings result. Nothing is left but the mourners. It’s the province of our bard up at Oxford. Nobody throbs in shame, derided worldwide. Scandal pierces, is poignant, pi-quant, resonant. If I could reorder that sad thing they call a state fair . . . You see, scandal is obsession, essence! Instead of the freak show, I’d have the heroes of scandal caged up while folks filed by to review them.”
“Review them? Then what?”
“Why, throw rotten fruit, eggs and excrement at them!” Harold gave that long girlish neigh that grabbed his throat after some of his insights, and too many heads turned in the Holiday Inn bar. He didn’t care.
“Scandal is delicious, little man. All we are is obsession and pain. That is all humans are. And when these wild things go public, and are met with howls, they ring out the only honest history we have! They are unbearable! Magnificent! Wicked! You read where the pathetic object goes off to psychiatric care or some phony drinking hospital, or a dull jail, but that’s only for the public, slamming the door shut on them. What they really are is raving on the heath, little man, in their honest unbearable humanity!”
So, in months afterward, I tried to achieve soul, or stand in the path of it so it would come to me. And I thought deeply about what I could do, what I had, who I was, to possibly rave on the heath someday. I wanted very much a rare, perhaps even dark, thing with a woman—Natalie Wood or her cousin, after I’d sent New York Slim off begging. My imagination could do nothing else for me, otherwise.
Harold sort of faded at the little college. I got tired of him, and at midyear a real Korean vet appeared as a late student on campus. He w
as much like Harold, they said, and Harold was very annoyed at being somewhat displaced and duplicated. The other fellow went crackers in a motel over in Jackson one night. Harold was called over by a local pastor to help minister to him. He didn’t like this role at all, although he did what he could. The man had true awful memories of Chosin Reservoir and was not poetic at all in his breakdown, also very real. Harold, you could tell, was fairly sorry to help him get back on his feet, and considered his insanity banal. I’d never seen Harold this ungenerous before, but I guess he was threatened by this man at the tiny college, where he used to hold forth among his desperate harem in the grill. He began giving “all of his entity” to a new large buxom girl with red cheeks who played clarinet in the orchestra, and I quit seeing much of him. He swore she was the one, an honest life’s passion. He was glad the waiting was over. I saw them at the drugstore together once. Harold was even paler and thinner and a good deal shorter than the girl. Drained by love, I guess. She had big calves and a very long lap, and seemed completely conquered by him. He was soon to graduate and become a high school teacher in a town north in the state that I didn’t think held much promise for scandal. He went off with no good-bye, the girl with him.
I just remembered that before he left I at last hit the mark on scandal for him, and he saw I was coming around.
“Okay, give me a worthy scandal, little man.” I was taller than Harold.
“This way. General MacArthur is discovered hunching a sheep just minutes after his ‘Old Soldiers Never Die, They Just Fade Away’ speech to a grateful Congress.”
“Finally. Perfect. Discovered by one of Truman’s aides, some nervous square from Missouri.”
The wild horsey shout.
My parents were much relieved, I detected, when Harold was finally away. The age, the dress, his bewildering pull, never set right for them, and my mother was disturbed when I told her he had found her attractive.
Now I was being a fine lad with my pal Horace, but not too fine, pulling out the bricks from the theater razement by honest sweat and toil, bored insane and almost to bed in Kosciusko. I looked down at the lobby desk from the balcony a long long time, but nobody came. It was just the old man sitting the night in the same chair, full speed ahead with his tangled stare, a silent movie of Godot even further gone into real life. Just to get a rise from him I spoke out the French title, like Harold loved to: “En Attendant Godot!” a little above normal speaking voice.
This worried the man, and he turned his head slowly around, then cocked it back at me, whose face denied anything had made a noise at all. He seemed very worried, even alarmed. Then for no good cause at all, I did my queer pantomime, slicking my eyebrows, running my tongue back and forth, my eyes big and avid, arms out as if to dive down on him. I was suddenly very angry at him for not being a woman. He was looking backward straight up at me. His arms began moving and a low rush of language I did not understand muttered from him.
I felt so good and healthy and showered, but I was using up all my potential here. My manhood was being sucked away by a dead town. My pal Horace opened the door of our room. He’d taken a nap to prepare himself for a real sleep in a minute, and gave a grogged palsy smile, feeling good too, with his body worked. I kept up the queer routine, which he always thought was a howl. He mimicked drop-kicking a homo in the groin. Horace was a bass player and quite a scholar, much better at books than I was. We passed much time mimicking the stone-dumb and depraved creatures of our state, especially the governor, who had recently suggested setting off large nuclear devices to blow open a canal way from the Tennessee River to Mobile.
“Come here. I want you to listen,” he said.
“Listen?”
“Come here.”
He took me to the window, which was open to the lukewarm Kosciusko evening, and told me not to look down, just listen.
At first I heard what I took to be just somebody mumbling on the sidewalk beneath us. Then a harmonica started up, very softly, lonely as a midnight highway dog. It was the blues, with no audience, for no money. For all my musical life, I’d never heard the blues erupt solitary and isolated like this. When the harmonica stopped, the voice went very high and strained in its grief—you couldn’t really tell whether it was a man or a woman.
“Let’s . . .”
“Don’t look down,” said Horace.
“What? Why not?”
“Let’s don’t find out who it is. You don’t want to know, do you?”
I saw his point. Horace had a copy of Swann’s Way on the bed beside where he was sleeping and he was deep.
Kosciusko was a better town than we thought, if it afforded this tune at ten in the night. Maybe it was a man just released from jail, or maybe a woman just off a bus somewhere. Horace was right on, it was best not to know the source of this eerie, moaning thing. You couldn’t quite make out the words, but it had the blackstrap moan in it all right. The harmonica trailed in again, sweet and with a bit of terror in it. I grabbed the song. It was all mine. I heard something when the voice started and I could tell Horace had not caught it. Buddy, could you spare a future? This can’t be life. Then it just stopped and did not come back, like something swallowed up in a storm drain. I didn’t hear any steps going away. I looked over to shake my head, smiling, but Horace had already gone back to sleep.
I went out, closed the door, to see what more I could get from the balcony rail. Sometimes you see something that seems made for you, like a good fishing hole, and you won’t leave it although the hours prove there’s nothing there. The old man was still at his post, along with the gone tan carpet, the gone desk clerk, serried cubbyholes in a rack behind. But then, I could hardly believe it, feet in ladies’ sandals appeared, and a stretch of nice tan leg, black short-cut hair in bangs with a few strands of gray in it, and I could not question: a black long-sleeve slightly unseasonal sweater, bosoms small but prominent, and like great lamps in this stag-dark tedium. It was New York Slim, about ten years older than I had guessed her. I was back to New York Slim, instantly unfaithful to Natalie Wood, Natalie was nothing, this woman and I already having had two years of history in the head, you can’t deny old lovers. I couldn’t see all her face, but from the cut to the profile you knew she was at least summer chicken going into fall maybe. She talked to the old man, but he did not rise like an Old South gent should. Then she came up the stairs and saw me, kept going but slower, and the age in her face wasn’t too much—not quite in my mother’s era—with the muscles in her face making lines that matched those in her legs, drawing tight in strands as she took the last two steps. She did not look of this place at all. Then she smiled but at the same time shook her head, as if she knew something about me besides the fact I was nothing but a boy and felt that very much as I looked into her eyes—what color?—and sensed deep events decades long. Also, she was easy here, maybe she lived here, because without checking in she opened the door two away from ours and went in. I was so happy and tormented I looked at the last of her foot going in the closing door many times over, gathered to the rail like a great sinner at the bar.
I checked quickly, very quietly, to see if Horace was still asleep. Ever since the music out on the street I knew something was being made for me, only me, unshareable. It might have been her singing, though already I knew it wasn’t, no, but the singer could be an agent of telepathy as Harold believed in. Sure. The set of her was foreign here, I was certain of that. I had nothing to say. But Harold, now Harold would just go up to somebody and talk if he wanted to. With women he told me he just went right up and said I think we should be friends and probably sleep together, and it worked, he was right in with them. I went to her door and knocked, an enormous chill all over my body. It took a while. I thought I heard her say inside not yet. I knocked again. She opened the door barefooted with a bottle in her hand, a little clear one not for booze, and she was about to say something but I wasn’t who she thought.
“I feel I ought to know you,” I said. “You ring a bell.�
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“You don’t know me. And I don’t want to know anybody else now, especially not anybody decent and young.” She took a pull on the bottle, and she seemed a little drunk.
“I’m not so decent as all that.”
“He thinks you are a Communist. He forgot to say you’re only a boy. Why’d you scare him?”
“That old man down there? I was just clearing my throat. Stretching.”
“He said you had symbolic gestures.”
“Oh. He’s a sick one, you know.”
“Yes he is. A very sick one.”
“Could we just talk? We’ve been working bricks and it gets lonesome. We’ve been at it now a week.”
She pulled from the bottle again and I could smell something familiar from it, not booze, something we’d had in the house. The label had microscopic print.
“Come in, oh Mister Communist Police. Arrest me if you must, but I will never break. I will never tell.”
“I’m no Communist. Don’t kid. Say, you’ve been living here.”
“I doubt it,” she said. Not only was she blurred in speech but the speech wasn’t quite American. I knew it.
“I go away, I come back. I go away, I come back,” she continued.
Besides some domestic things on the dresser, there was a bicycle raised on a jack to its axle. You could pedal and go nowhere. I pointed this out, asking if something was wrong with it. You never, also, saw a woman her age on a bike where I come from.
“I go nowhere on that one.” Beside the bike were tall black-laced boots, looking serious and military, but they seemed her size. She sat and slumped to one arm on the bed, pulling from the tiny bottle again.
“What’s that?”
“Happy medicine for nervous bad women.” I saw it was paregoric, the stuff prescribed on ice for nausea. I didn’t know about the opium in it then.
