by Barry Hannah
I met a boy my age who had inherited vast wealth and seemed to like me. He had no job, did nothing but wander about, and I saw him exit one or two parties with his head down, looking run-over, with people gazing at his back. I had never met a true creep—a slug—although we used the item handily all through high school and college in Columbia (Missouri). But here was your real specie at last, a young man who could buy anything and had omitted to buy (possible, of course) a personality. He just hung around. I became his favorite and he would show up at bar dates uninvited, somehow finding out about my appointment with another person around Charles Street in the Village. He would appear, then stare at me, then at the floor; now with his face to me, turned again, after an unsettling hungry look. He wasn’t gay as I suspected. He was nothing, just some sort of thing seeking my shade.
I had got to New York somehow without being conscious of Thomas Hart Benton, an artist from practically my own backyard—a real artist whose work, had I known it, would have discouraged me from New York entirely. But certain other artists loved the fact I’d never heard of him, and with them I was promoted in esteem. We were drinking a lot of cheap drinks in a cheap tavern and talking over my possibilities as a new savage (dream on), when this slug person, this creep, appeared again, looking at me, then down. I was drunk and angry over my treatment by the galleries, so I let him have it, very unlike myself. But he really was too much. I charged: What do you want? What are you after? Why are you here? Why aren’t you dead? His narrow shoulders, the cocked-over head with chubby face—I can still see it—the small burned dirty eyes. I watched real pain and a faint smile come over him, such a hopeless and yet triumphant look as I’d never seen. He turned around, and after saying “I’m so sorry” with his back to me, he left and I didn’t see him for a year.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was my artist pal, a boy from Maine not as drunk as I was. “You’re the fourth one this summer. He stays and comes and interlopes and then an eruption from somebody like you he’s been begging for, and he goes out whipped. I think he loves it, I know he does. He works you for abuse, gets it, and now he might be off stroking himself. Then he moves to another person.”
I was staggered and instantly sober. My feel for the whole city was different now. I knew I was a loser too, but I was almost sick and very angry at what a fellow with every option like the creep could bring himself to. I thought I could even still smell his stale white oily body in here, like old margarine.
The rest of this story goes into the next summer when I was in the city just a week to flush out old mediocrities, and we were turning warm in mutual condolences, we less hopeful floggers, in the same tavern, when Elton, the creep, came in with the best-looking woman I had ever seen anywhere. He was unchanged, slumping, holding his mouth like a stunned halibut’s, less than zero to say. Nobody had ever known where, under what cold bricks he lived. He was always just abruptly there, parachuted it seemed—that sudden—out of some ghastly greasy aerial pollution, face like the cunt of a possum. But the woman, why, she was with him and not vomiting, not vomiting at all. I think she was Brazilian. Pecan-skinned, silver-heeled, high-breasted all-out for summer. The despair in the tavern you could dip with a cup, and I wet my pants in sorrow and desire. That poor beauty, bought outright by Elton as his wife, was so reamed and gouged within one minute by every straight male eye in the bar she’d have been sausage under a few rags and heels had thought taken action. Elton—I did catch it, didn’t I?—looked at me briefly and lifted one upper lip in what I think was an attempt at a smirk, although it was hard to tell with the dead eyes. All he did was stand there with her fifteen minutes. Neither one of them even had a drink. They said he was all sober now but he was such a creep nobody had ever known he was alcoholic, and if changed he looked worse now. Still, I believe I caught his smirk, which he did not have character enough to maintain. Then they strolled out, or she did, and he had his doughy oily palm on her crease, a whole other order of butt it was so good, and then I suffered the gnashing tragedy of never seeing her again, ever, in my life.
This I relay partially to explain I have not failed in only one place. No, I am cosmopolitan, tested. Also to assure you as in those fat bright books you might read that the truly wealthy are often true worms. But not so much this as to warn myself about the surgeon’s wife, especially waiting right now in the Audi for her special abuse, maybe, a different sort than Elton’s, but I’ve an edge of sickness about this too. Something in her leans over on me out of her soul, a quality of boiled spaghetti. She appears and sits and waits a bit too much. She has told me that her first child (she has another) was created by her hand from the condom of her husband, herself alone in the bathroom while he slept, in the slyness of determined motherhood. He did not want children now, in school. Why’d she tell me? Does she see it as adorable or valiant? Is it a testimony of slightly appalling urges in the womb or an ugly little act of deceit and control? I can’t tell, honestly. She appears and sits and waits a bit too much. There is, without my having possessed her yet, a bit too much preparation and dullish watchful stare about her, and a persistent slackening in her jaws, though she has a red marvelous mouth, as if she were sucking at me in bits and might become at her climacteric all mouth and vacuum, oral entirely, have me down the maw with only my poor shoes sticking out. I fear in short that she is a creep. But that’s not even the worst fear. As with Elton I know now I was frightened he wanted near me because I was a creep. Creeps go for creeps and the veterans know who they are instantly. Because a loser like me can have honor—as the used have honor and life even in their outrage, while the user has mere habit—and the creep none. Was evil ever this low, banal, and gaudy? Imagine Elton, who was indeed the picture of Mr. Trump without money, but more slumped and even oilier, but the same mouth and dead eyes. And Elton went directly to me. I knew the others he went to: they were at least latent creeps, without exception—the common denominator my friend from Maine left out.
I won’t tell Mary everything, but it’s necessary I listen to her, because I’m beginning to feel threatened, without consummation, only long preparation by our words, our merchandise, and our car wrecks. A certain song had come out I’d heard on the FM, and now I owned it. By Radiohead. The name of it exactly: “Creep.” It is a haunting thing, sung by a creep to a goddess oblivious to him. I think of Elton. “What am I doing here?” the creep pleads, and it hits me very deeply, a pain of perfect acknowledgment. Why do I like it so much? Why has Mary asked me to please quit playing it over and over, paying no attention to the other songs on the CD? What am I so tranced about? she demands. Why don’t you go out and just rake her down, the doctor’s ex-fox? Not all women are good. Some women have tragic pussies, she pushed on to get to my head. I’d never heard Mary use a bad word and I stopped the music.
“There’s something wrong with women who talk and wait and plan too much. My friend. Why you? There are certainly others more in her league. Why is she still in town, even?” she says.
Now I’m truly scared in my concupiscence, my ready loins, my thighs with some muscle definition all sightly from private squats with seventy pounds on my shoulders, my calves corded and well-tennised—these secret extraordinary gifts all for her waiting. But I frown at good Mary. Then comes the patient smile and the hooded eyes, taught by example by my own father in home combat. “I wish I was special! But I’m a creep!” the defeated tenor of Radiohead howls. “I don’t belong here!”
God what freedom in that statement. I just adore it and am terrified too.
Elton, at last confessed, at last! Elton! Forgive my abuse, little rich man!
Besides buying various rugs, mats, futons, pillows, and even sleeping bags for us to have our earnest postures on in different rooms together, Jane is planning her own home for the first time in her life, she says. Her dearly own. It will be a tour. I sense I am something of an agent of travel for her. The home is going up north of the city, near a lake, on a hill with big trees and hanging moss around it. She
stands spread-legged like Marilyn over that grate in New York in the empty boarded air of her rooms, while I watch her high eloquent rump and tennis legs, just a slight burn of tan on them, and fine ankles into slung-back short heels. With her back to me I can almost bring back the Brazilian, Elton’s bride. She intends to be “courted” this time. She wants stages. She loves it that we met on the tennis courts, like college children. I’d been so long without a woman, I could wait and get excited only in the head for a while, as you can get unhungry by not eating long enough. I think I had not, until Jane, ever had dessert at a restaurant and stared slyly for two hours at every twitch of a woman’s eyebrows, blue in the groin. I go to bed alone. No, really, it is not disagreeable. My head language becomes cleaner, my instincts have a sudden balm, and I feel right tidy in this love, if that’s what I have.
A nun once told me she had been constantly in love all her life, a sweet mental love more superb and wider than any touching could supply.
“Impossible,” I said.
“Well damn you,” she added, “Mister.”
She too must have guessed I was a creep, because her voice had run out scarily as from another person sitting beside her on the airplane. And she was shocked. I was shot with cold.
I have lately thought about my birthplace, St. Louis, and what is wrong there. Eminent creeps have issued from there as by some necessity of the environment. T. S. Eliot and William Burroughs, maybe they are profound, but does anybody miss the sluggish dead-staring creep quality in them either? Jane is also from there. I could never quite decide about the hipster of my New York summer, the paragon, Miles Davis, who in his autobiography gave us the nice term country hip for bluesmen along the river. But sometimes there was a rancid flatness to him, even beyond his heroin glare. The surgeon’s wife—I call her that when I put her away a bit to study—loves the right clothes, I love the right clothes, and Miles Davis held them near sacred. I want to be country hip like Davis’s friends, smooth as a modest flower behind the counter of the parts store. Jane seems more born in the latest shift, her hair fluffed casually by some fag offstage, impeccable.
She told me one afternoon the only other man she had loved since her husband was a man dying of cancer whose intensity in life and lovemaking was so beautiful it made her cry, and she knew I’d do that for her too. I could almost feel myself at that moment writhing in her arms like a dolphin on dry land.
I worry that I’ve buried and denied the fact there were so few truly admirable adults during my upbringing in St. Louis. Were they there and I was such a creep I missed them all? Did they all become just a little less vicious as they aged, more reconciled and easy, simply because they had no more teeth and were horrified that they’d be ignored and scorned? These men and women became softer and kinder, with infinite patience too, especially with their grandchildren. But I did not trust them. It has been said about a successful painting acquaintance of mine—by quick Mary—an only child rather clubby in his friendships with “real” men like hunters and other painters of the hard-angled quotidian, that once he had got all he could out of unkindness, he turned to kindness. Then I regard the spacial grace of Indian tennis players. Places do make people. There was a family in St. Louis I lived with, sleeping with their divorced mother. Only her son, the more Southern one for some reason, with his easy strength, his quiet voice, his hesitation to judge, was bearable. The daughter, every day on the backseat of the car as she was taken to school, said, demanding: “Turn on the radio, please.” The please just an irony in her mouth, in a flat, mean voice. The mother obliged as if hypnotized, never pausing to find that rock-and-roll button for the brat. One day I couldn’t bear it any longer, but when she was out of the car to school I did not attack. Rather I started weeping because of the sadness of being around this hugely indulged vixen, and I knew love would die soon because I couldn’t stand the home life that made her possible.
The long study that idiots give themselves, the endless excuses of the weak and vicious. The willingness to go public with hideous disease as if that were the primary goal in life. Why else am I writing? Two men were playing beside me on the next tennis court last spring. They were, as they hit the ball, yelling to each other about their exercises, their protein intake, their reps, their lats, their pecs, their squats. Screaming their charts at one another. Later on one of them smiled at me in a café as if we were close buddies, since I had been there to listen, nothing amiss here, hands out my kindred. I had a hard time frowning him off, this monster. His body looked to me like something foul and bought, a meat suit.
Now the house is done, Thanksgiving has passed, and I have had Jane in all her rooms with the ardor of long dreamers, and the wait proves all worth it, an instance where the flesh has really gone into more pleasures than even the dreams. But I knew she was wonderful, and that begging for minor disaster seemed artificial, like something I had cultivated from a book by a French existentialist in college, just in order to seem properly grave.
Not especially Sartre or Camus, but much of college now anyway seems like an endless qualification and rebuke to pleasure by the same kind of middle-aged people I grew up with, so that the bean of the reasonable and moderate would grow to the size of a tree in the head you could barely see out of by the time you became an adult yourself, thus to sit in your room and review the world, choked by moderation in all things. I did not see happy middle-aged men until I began going to roadhouses to hear and watch, more, rhythm-and-blues musicians, some of them with white hair and bellies, having a fine time on what must have been sub-minimum wages. I hold no brief for the universal holiness of African-Americans that goes down as commandment in much of the press today. But I was overwhelmed by the sight of dark older Americans having fun. Most, I loved them for their bellies. They’d been having it a long time, on much good collards, fatback, and cheap whiskey.
Jane was five years older than me. I’m not sure whether we were jaded eccentrics or new discoverers of the body electric. In different rooms decorated in subtle “rhythm and hue” changes—some help from the St. Louis granny of an interior decorator she had in the wings, a naughty queer I liked too—I delivered myself unto Jane, at her shy suggestions, as French, Greek/African (where the bottoms are of more interest), Italian, then just straight-on Missouri missionary, always talking while making love the way she said her ex, no real man, never did. Jane had a girl’s voice I found highly arousing, and I hope I did not sound too silly like Harry Truman as a mad poet, because Jane could sing, I mean around the house she sang anything well, on key and with luxury. I asked her one day, laughing, why we didn’t sometimes just get on an airplane and visit some of the countries, since I was so busy enacting the United Nations. I’d be glad to pay for it all. Then she shocked me, and I began looking down at the lake below her house, a beautiful but saddening view through the hanging moss.
“I never traveled. I never intend to travel. I don’t like far parts. We traveled enough getting our things for this house. We’ve got the big-screen TV and all the good stations. What more is there to see?”
She’d got a handsome divorce settlement and had her own money anyway, and a doctor father who’d given her this place as a gift. This luck of mine, well I quit boasting inside about it just then. The garter I gave her with I WANT IT EVERY DAY printed on, which she had worn until we got married—I asked her about it. She said wearing it nude with hose on had always made her feel foolish. Now I felt like a pressing creep without much to give from my world.
In my world I had straightened and ordered my supplies and parts in the showroom and taken down the posters of half-naked girls leaning across the hoods of Maseratis and Lotuses, things that pleased me and made my customers buy something expensive for the sheer hell of it, a ticket to half-brassieres in foreign towns. Mary helped me. In our days of intimacy she’d never said anything about the poster women, and now made no fun of me when they came down at Jane’s request.
Mary and I could never have made it as lovers. I don�
��t like to sleep with women who are smarter than me. But I’d never had a real friendship with a woman until Mary, and I was enjoying the pleasant wonder of it very much, when I was not suicidal. Now the rare times Jane came in the store, if Mary was there Jane looked through her with such frozen smiling malice that Mary offered to never come around again. She had plenty to do, with her own painting, which she could have sold even more of at good fees if she’d cared. But I begged her not to leave. I don’t believe I could have stood it.
On Jane’s idea of having the world on our big-screen television: The very next day I had some trouble with the boy who works my stockroom. I knew he was on something, but he didn’t steal and he did a fair job. I was amused by his old-man’s miseries at age twenty-three, compounded by the fact he couldn’t read and thought I didn’t know that. That afternoon he came in bleary and in a rage and asked me if I kept a pistol. He needed to kill somebody who had just insulted him for the last time.
“Why no, Byron. My God, fool. You’ll go to prison. Think this out.”
“I have. They got color TV in prison.”
He was high on something, but he had never been more serious. He was ready for his life to be over and resign himself, with relish, to the high-gloss realm of somebody else’s vision from now on. I could barely reply. I’d never known how he hated himself and his life so much. Even in my worst depressions I was still snob enough to know I would take out myself in my own act, in my own show, never by the congealed vision of others who need you half-dead in a chair to own the world. Then I asked Jane something that had bothered me and I was afraid to know.
