Barry Hannah - Long, Last, Happy - New and Collected Stories

So I havent said it, Ive written it and I hope this might make a difference. But I think it wont, not at all. Im got, Im doomed.

But its done for Deacon Charles and he says he will send it on to the governor. That makes me even or better than Deacon Charles, remember.

TODAY, VERNON, I NOTICED ELVIS WAS GETTING HAIRY. FINDING THAT, my tongue got hot all the way down to my heart to which it was attached. There was no keeping off the temperature or the rump rump noise of my want in my person. We don’t go to church hardly anymore except to learn good English. Their music ain’t ourn. Ourselves, we suck the air out the radio when it plays the Memphis beam with Negroes, shouts, moans and rumps in it. Between ourselves we conceive a sound like a worried panther having lots of mama and baby words. It can’t be in a church. We take the airwaves out of our little Philco and spit them back with the mama panther in them. The Philco is all we could afford after you wrote the extra zero on that check and left us for three years in jail.

From now on you are such a disgrace, you understand, that you have absolutely no sway in anything and will only hang in the back or at the rear side to us in disrespect. I, with my dark inset eyes, him and his rustling eyes, we have made a vow, Elvis and I: that we will remain slim and elegant and catlike in our movements until the day he has captured his child bride, who will dye her hair jet black like mine. Then I, then he, will get fat together in blurring of each other toward the end, and we have impacted ourselves so. We like pills when we can get them but our beauty we know can’t never last, that’s a part of the glory. We can’t be forty years old. Romance don’t really allow forty years of life to what we are. Oh, we might go on as something , some shape or mass, but we’re not even there anymore, it’s burnt up, panther and all.

He will sing about the Teddy Bear, how he wants to be it, and millions of little ears will hear something like never they heard before, down to their feet, and wealth untold will unfold. Every song will be about me, it won’t be no real girl, and that is what they will hear and gasp upon and find so magic all to their toes. In pictures you will see him with women, all kinds of gorgeous girls and cute like what ignored him when he was poor and baby-pretty, but you will never ever see love in Elvis’s eye for any of them, because it will only be me, and our music together. He’ll be looking away like into a mirror all his life but it’s me he’s looking at. You won’t be able to imagine Elvis ever looking directly at anybody, it will always be off to the side at guess who, the mirror maybe? but more me.

Then I will die and the source will dry up for him. The famous will visit him at some mansion right on Memphis’s Main Street, and he will tell these people, in maybe English, “Mama ain’t out there no more feeding them chickens in the back.” The tears and the crack in his voice will always be there from then on, Vernon — jail trash, you’ll be back venaling around like a rodent with an evangelist hairdo, but the money will be bad , Vernon, always bad, like that extra zero you wrote on that check — and my boy will get coiled and wrapped and weird inside and out, leaping in flight wild with Tupelo space clothes on him, doing movements that are trying to climb the ladder to heaven where his mama is, and the music gift will still be there, only there ain’t nothing worthy to sing no more, and he is making those thrown-out grabbing postures and sweating like with my fluid all over him, becoming a mass, just a groping mass, on the rope — up, up, me waiting for him.

Because there ain’t anything like Mama Nooky. Ask all them soldiers that lay dying on the fields of that great war you weren’t in.

EDGAR PLAYED THE TROMBONE AND FOR EIGHT YEARS HE WAS A MOST requested boy. Based in Chicago, he did a lot of studio work and homed in the fine, lusty Peets Lambert band. He could step into a serious club and be hailed and dragged onstage by any good band. Even back when, in Georgia at age seventeen, he was more than accomplished on both slide and valve. He favored the copper and silver Bachs. He’d come out of Athens roaring, skipping his high school senior year because he was such a prodigy. Edgar had then got the ear of a jazz fanatic on the university faculty who contracted for his audition in Nashville with Peets Lambert’s old big band. It was turning electric and throwing out, ruthlessly, the old players. Lambert had a new sound — jazz/swing, jazz/reggae, jazz/classic, jazz/blues, jazz/country, even. This was simply desperation to survive. The band had not recorded in seven years. Now even the manager was only twenty.

Lambert, a disguised sixty-six, had not made enough to be comfortable from constant tours. He was wearing down, had emphysema, and it was hoped the new Lambert Big Thunder Hounds would get hip and record again. Edgar was approved immediately. He found himself in Chicago with two suitcases, two horns, and ten thousand dollars from Lambert. The band members came from everywhere and almost all were near-adolescent. Edgar loved them. He’d been on the horn so thoroughly since age ten that he’d never been to a scout or church camp or had even played in a high school band, having bypassed them for the Atlanta Symphony at age fourteen. So this was a grand society for him. He loved it, lived it, inhaled it. Immediately he began cigarettes — what the heck? — and staying out late with the guys: hipsters from Los Angeles, nerds from Juilliard, a gal bassist from Jackson, Mississippi — his crush — who hardly spoke except relentlessly and in exquisite taste with her Ampeg fretless. Edgar was in love from their first meeting. He too was shy and awkward, except on his horn, and it took him a year to ask her out, though he watched her religiously during his breaks — how she stood, short and blonde, but somehow with long, heartbreaking legs in black hose as she called on her strings to provide the hard bottom gut of the band. When they did record, did make money, back down in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, he listened and was caused to tremble by the wanton bass authority that poured from the modest, yes, woman. “All woman,” he repeated to himself.

Lambert threatened to throw them out if they took drugs or even drank much. The parents at home loved that about Lambert. He’d returned in fame from a beloved, almost persecuted era in music, and seemed a practical saint to them, a saint of cool when he appeared on television in a turtleneck with his still thick salt-and-pepper hair, beret, and those long genius piano fingers, announcing against drugs nationally. He was one of the first celebrities to do it in the seventies. A victim of cigarettes, he gently pled for the young to avoid his error, though everybody noticed the good man lighting one up in the wings or bathroom every now and then. He looked guilty, though, and nobody said a word. Edgar, with no prior use or education in drugs at all, learned something alarming: Parton Peavey, the black boy on guitar, came into the band daily on heroin and never stopped in the years that Edgar knew him. (He was a fabulous crowd-pleaser in a herd of twenty-six crowd-pleasers — flat-out celestial on an old Fender clawed to pieces, maybe dug out of a burned-down nightclub in the Mississippi Delta, the great bad taste of the fifties left in its remaining blue — Parton Peavey was a star and everybody knew it.) Parton was from east Texas, like the Winters, Stevie Ray and, later, Robert Cray. He would vacation in Beaumont once a month and return with a literal bag of heroin (China White in a one-pound burlap sugar bag). Edgar, drop-jawed, saw him fix himself in a Milwaukee hotel room, calm as putting on a Band-Aid. Didn’t he know Lambert would can him instantly? The band was heaven come real to Edgar and he couldn’t understand why Parton would do this. But Parton didn’t care, it seemed. He played brilliantly, though, and gigged out far more than any of them. The truth was that he was close on being a celebrity at his rail-thin age of twenty-one.