Barry Hannah - Ray

“You killed him,” she said.

“Well, hell,” I said.

“You want to get it on, Doctor Ray?”

“I can’t. I have a wife. Westy.”

She said, “I want you to screw me, darling.”

“Yeah. But I killed the old guy. Never did that before.”

“He deserved it. Let’s go dance and fuck.”

“I forgot how to dance about twelve years ago.”

“Yeah. But we could just go to my place, and fuck. You ever hear Jimi Hendrix? You and I could’ve saved him, poor old genius nigger.”

“RAY?”

“Yeah?”

“They got me.”

“Contact, Ed. I’m hearing you.”

“Put your spirit with mine now, old lieutenant. I’m ashes.”

Then he was.

The last time Sister came to me at the clinic, I wrote this record and this prescription.

— Female, 23. She has made one album and her next one is in process.

— Her mother, almost nonexistent.

— Her father, a philosopher.

— Her family. Two sets of twins, one of them recently backed over by a bus, plus two others.

— Her situation. Singer. Uses marijuana heavily. High blood pressure. 150/90. X-ray shows dark spot in the upper left lung.

Prescription:

— Valium, 25 mg. Every four hours until appetite returns. Prednisone, 200 mg. One every other day for two weeks. Then a half-pill every other day. 60 days. No refill.

PAT and I go out in my little MG. I don’t have the Corvette anymore because of the gas. But I like my little 73 Midget and the sky. You get this low and you get to look at the sky.

So me and Pat go out to the airport to look at the new two-million-dollar Learjet, and we get in the cockpit, and I show Pat the controls.

Pat is a wonderful guitarist from Chicago, as well as a medieval scholar and poet. Nobody’s killed him yet.

EVERYBODY I love is in the jet. We try New York, but it’s no good. I’ve got the.32 machine pistol that I killed a gook in the head with. He was dead and he had a hand grenade in his hand. But he threw a knife into the neck of Larry. We were all fueling at Ton Sa Nut. Fifteen F-4s all in line. You couldn’t ever kill enough of them. Vietnam was like fleas.

Never had a whore in Saigon. Never gambled my money. Quisenberry and I mainly just talked ourselves to sleep, then dropped Dexedrine when the horn sounded.

Harry King was flight control one night at the Tuscaloosa airport and brought Don in on autopilot from Chicago after he’d turned the plane in a storm and fainted.

Ray is out here with his beeper on his leg, just watching the planes come in over the blue lights, for no reason except to find my meditation again. Somehow the AM waves are getting into my beeper and I hear “Eleanor Rigby” from the Beatles. Where do all the lonely people come from? Ray is starting to sound like a man who was once a disk jockey. Because he’s run-down. I’m full of dopey tears and just as groping and lousy as the next citizen.

So I just wander into flight control. Harry’s very lonely with all the Teletypes. What in the hell comes in but an F-4 from the National Guard in Birmingham. He touches down, then off, wheels it out, gone at five hundred miles per hour. Beautiful Phantom.

“How you been, Harry?”

“Ray! Goddamn, you’re here I”

Here looking at the flat charts of the flight territory all over the world and Harry, still wearing his tie from WW II. He’s driving his crummy Toyota since the gas crunch and we talk about that. We share one of those huge TV dinners made for two. Not much to do here now.

The beeper sounds and it’s Rebecca.

“What?”

“Nothing, really,” she says. “I handled it. I’d just sort of like you to run back here and dick me.”

“I don’t have it in me,” I say.

“Okay. There’s another message, from Westy.”

“Put her on,” I say.

“I just cured three creeps with a light assist from your buddy, Doctor Litchens. You can’t imagine the swine I’m going to have to do a number with tonight.”

“Put Westy on.”

It was fifteen minutes. Harry and I were finishing up the chicken on the plate when she called. I hadn’t heard a straight and clear message from her in three months.

“Ray? Raymond Forrest?” My first two names.

“I hear you, darling.”

“Ray. We can make lovesies again.”

“Holy Christ!”

“Yes,” she said. “I want to be lovely all over you again.”

I was so entranced I forgot Harry King was right there beside me. You never get a whole conversation over the beeper like this unless you got somebody relaying it. Rebecca did it and was listening in.

I NEVER woke up feeling better. Made coffee, eggs, bacon for all my six children.

No complaints.

THE beeper goes off when Westy and I are doing something. We have our tongues so deep into each other’s and I am sucking her beautiful feet. It’s Rebecca.

“Mr. Hooch and Agnes bought a propane lantern and it exploded. He’s almost dead from burns, Doctor. She has second-degrees.”

Hooch was burned to a crisp and he weighed about a hundred pounds. His system was so exasperated, it was a total moan. The protein and the platelets and the nerves were wrecked and closing. His kidneys were going out. His liver count was as high as a man’s who hadn’t eaten in three months. The calcium was not protecting his lungs. Yet on fruit juice and plasma, his mind stayed. Even brighter. What an organ. You got a third of it left and you can still be a genius. For a while we couldn’t even get creamed field peas down him. He was burned down to the condition of the inside of a steak as Texans like them.

“You tried to kill yourself, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“Yes, you did. You know better than to light up a leaking propane tube.”

“I get tired of my wife and me. There ain’t much going on since Sister except my mouth.”

“Gimme a poem, Mr. Hooch. Let’s hear the best.”

One of the humiliations of my life was that my own secret poems never touched the poems of this old fart. All his genes must have run a pretty direct route into Sister.

Fire at Night

by J. HOOCH

Fire at night and it’s me. I’ve been born with pain

So this is sort of the same.

Agnes talks about forty years ago.

Her love is around, but I never got her mind’s number.

Love is above and behind you,

But someday, honey, I’ve got to find you.

We bad luck together and it ain’t ever going to get better.

We worse when we try to get better.

We got the jinx and the voodoo visited upon us.

But it’s New Year, so I’ll light myself up

With a cup of gas.

It’ll be a hell of a feeling,

And this one will really, really be the last.

“Not bad,” I say.

I go back to the dinette and sit with Rebecca. I smoked about four Luckies in a row and looked into her face without saying anything for a while. Rebecca’s face is a charm. She goes heavy on the blue eye makeup. Her neck is a longish classic from the old paintings of what’s-his-name. Her nose is forward and long. She lights a Lucky and the exhaust is gray through the large sensitive nostrils. She’s half-Jew, the rest Greek. Okay, now I’ve come back from the humiliation of never thinking up a better poem than Mr. Hooch. Then we go through two cups of coffee apiece. Modigliani.

“No, he’s not, goddamn it.”