Barry Hannah - Ray

ONE of the great bad strokes I did was marry the prettiest girl on campus. I was so horny and everything else was pretty nothing except red bricks and Baptists, a few queers in the drama and English departments. I got thrown out of my room by a senior who thought he could box. I knew nothing about boxing. This was supposed to be my roommate. He was a blond, acned guy, and he was punching me. So I said, “Stop.”

He quit, though he was still shifting, bouncing.

“My name’s Wild Man Thomas,” he said.

IT’S quiet, utterly quiet, except for the air conditioner going in my room. The companionship is with the air alone. I am asking forgiveness for all my sins, on my knees. I got to get my mind in a higher sphere.

I WAS treating a large old woman who spat in my face. I fell backward into the heater, face-forward. This is to prove that I’m not always the hero.

NURSES have saved me. I wander through the day like a horde often. I can’t hit the directional signal on my car. I trip over my unredeemable cockiness. I drop a can of 7-Up in the hall and fall down in front of Dr. Everything, the world surgeon I always wanted to meet and impress.

One evening, late, I was watching a nigger up in a tree picking his nose. The nigger worked for the electric company and was apparently new. He’d climbed up the tree next to the light pole.

“What you laughing at?” said another big nigger behind me, wearing a helmet.

FOR no clear reason Ray will have it out with the plants in his place. His anger comes up when he looks around at the expensive greenery and all the deathly care people give to plants when, if let alone, all plants are fine. Plants can talk, he’s heard: “Eat me. Eat me.” That’s all Ray’s ever heard. Anybody besides Ray see Little Shop of Horrors? A great plant in some creepy Jew’s flower shop starts calling out, “Feed me, feed me!” He eats people. So the Jew goes and accidentally kills a number of people and their faces appear in the blossoms of the plant.

Ray has lost it. He kicks over the plants and yells abuses. Mainly, it’s because his poems are not going well and he still can’t come anywhere close to old J. Hooch.

Westy comes in. She’s disturbed.

“Are you drinking, Ray?”

“No. Get me a drink.”

She’s wearing beige sandals and her toenails are maroon. She has a glass of milk with her, reaches back with it, pours it over the crease of her buttocks and fetches my tongue in.

I’m as earnest as an evangelist when I mount her.

BILL, my dad, came over to check on me again. He’s been everywhere, from hard-crushing Depressionville to Russia. Got him the new Mercury that gets twenty-seven miles per gallon on unleaded, high visibility. He still looks handsome. Still the man who gave me life. Seventy-five years old. Afflicted only by deafness and arthritic feet. Always got money, maybe pull out a thousand of the five hundred of them he’s worth now.

Bill roomed with Senator Eastland at Ole Miss. He and the great senator were going to be law partners. But Bill had to go back to Homewood, in Jefferson County, to support his family. Bill is a naturalist and is determined not to let Ray not listen to his advice now because he never had any advice for Ray when he was young.

Bill looks good.

He has the open, eager eyes of a man who has confessed and tried to put it back right. He always gave me the advantages.

COMING back from the convention in Omaha, I was thinking about my first wife. Because you have to be honest. You are packed with your past and there is no future.

We got married stupid and frantic, Millicent and me. Things at one point were lovely. The children were lovely, and waiting for them was a miracle like the rainbow. And although you try to get shut of those gorgeous moments when we had nothing but good neighbors, the pines, and the sky to look at, it’s true, we had a sublimity. Our children are ready for the world, and they are handsome enough and know enough science.

I have seen so many people not worth saving, not worth putting the tubes into.

God jokes with his best ones.

What release, to look into the past the way I just tried. A petrified log just rolled off my heart.

CHARLIE DESOTO is in the office.

“Ray, I’ve discovered that my wife is a lesbian, or at least so far divorced from usual commerce between us that love words do no good. Love-making hurts. It seems to be an inconvenience. It’s smelly, messy. She makes me feel like a raper. I can never satisfy her. This baffles this poor fool who married her and had so many, I can’t tell you, uh, loves with her. She prefers to sleep with her old coloring books. Nothing sensual I can say to her touches her. I’ve been drinking too much. I’ve used cocaine, LSD, listened for the phone, waited for her letters, since we’ve been apart. What do I do?”

“Split. Get out of this CM.”

“But I still have wonderful love dreams of her.”

“You can have dreams of somebody else.”

“I envy you and Westy. You sit there very smug.”

“Get off of it. Westy’s a hell of a woman, but I’ve had three months with no nooky. People are like weather where she grew up. I’m terribly sorry your wife’s queer.”

I went by Hooch’s house. The yard is cleaned up. The backyard is raked and the grass is growing around it like a billiard table. They are clean and neat now that Sister is dead. He’s working on the tugboat and looks two decades from his real age. He and Agnes don’t sleep in the same room anymore. He lives in Sister’s acoustic-tile room, and he plays those records and he writes his poems that beat the hell out of mine.

And the old man is sixty-seven. He’s got himself an Olivetti automatic typewriter and plays Sister’s album over and over.

He picks up her brassieres and her pictures and her underwear.

He handed me one:

Grief is

Looking at the wooden Indian where your little ones should be.

I bought a new color teevee.

All the people you should be are on the screen.

Everybody is pretty.

THERE will never be, stepson, another person that I have respected and loved as much as you.

Your stepfather will not fall down. Your step-dad Ray has created abuse and horrors in the house because of him and drink. I wasn’t born straight. God gave me a hundred-and-fifty IQ and perfect pitch on instruments. Sometimes I don’t hear. I am having a constant burn-out on communications. Nobody means any harm. Everybody is swell. Just can’t get through to anybody.

You, boy, will travel with beauty. Not just righteousness, which is easy, but beauty too. I saw you at Murrah move like a genius. You are a chieftain. You threw the ball, you scrambled, and the niggers dropped it.

Never be cruel, weird, or abusive.

I promise not to take a jet anymore.

I love your mother.

Amy, Bobby, too.

This boy is so full of loves the juice comes out his eyes.

Alt. 2000, 1000, 500, 120, flaps down, lights on? Yes. Port. Pork and beans.

Pick the football up, travel rearward on your legs, the way is clear, there is your receiver, arms up in the lights on the green field. The football leaves your arm like a quail. He’s got it. Runs into the last green zone.