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

A few scandals at the college made Harold beam and emerge from his habitual state, which was, I think I can say, a kind of expectant gloom. A luster came on him when it was clear the speech and drama teacher — who had kept one of his male protégés, a prominent sissy, in lust bondage — had gone down to scandal, and packed up, leaving in the night. Harold’s pale hairy arms flailed out and back, delighted, up to the neck in it. “Oh, the truth and beauty of a wrecked life, nothing touches it!” he went, imagining the moment-by-moment excruciations of the discovered pederast. The drama master, driving lonely and flushed in his car back to North Carolina. Then there was the milder, but somehow more “evocative” disclosure regarding the tall Ichabodish French teacher, a curiously removed (how! they learned) man, who drove a giant old blue Cadillac that seemed even larger than Detroit intended. This timid man oozed about in something between a hearse and a cigarette boat. His exposure came about when his landlord opened his rooms one holiday. Everywhere in the room were Kleenexes and castaway plastic bags from the cleaners. He would touch nothing in the room without a Kleenex. He had his socks and underwear dry-cleaned, and wore them straight from the bags. Unused clothes were stacked in their bags in the corner. Kleenex was all over the bedsheets. He could not touch the telephone, doorknob, faucet, or even his own toothbrush without them. Kleenex boxes towered in all nooks and closets. In his diary, there was a last sobbing entry: “Night and day, I detect moisture around my body. Must act.” He was, this French prof, comprehensively germophobic, and the strange order of his disorder howled from the room. Probably this was not even a scandal, but in this small Baptist town with the landlord so loud about it, the professor too was reduced, and soon prowled away in shame. Harold relished this. The perfection of it almost silenced him, a silly eye-shut dream on his face. “The perfection, the perfection, of this.” Every worthy life would have a scandal, Harold said. There was a central public catastrophe in the life of every person of value. The dead sheep, the masses, who lived fearful of scandal (though feeding off it in nasty little ecstasies) were their own death verdict. “Prepare, prepare, little man, for your own explosion,” he told me sincerely. “I am trying to be worth a scandal myself.” Oscar Wilde enchanted him, and Fatty Arbuckle, but not Mae West, who had worn scandal like a gown and made a teasing whole career of it.

I once was sent over to the college by my English teacher to pick up a tape recorder, and was making as long a trip out of it as I could, when I passed a class and saw Harold in the back row, looking down at his desk in silent rage, not as if baffled but as if understanding too much, and personally offended. But this was less noticeable than what he wore. I had simply caught him out of his house in the act of being Harold, gritting his teeth, twirling his pencil, hissing. He had on an old-fashioned ribbed undershirt, some floppy gray-green pants, and some sort of executive shoes, I think banker’s wingtips, with white tube workman’s socks. His hair curled out everywhere from his pale skin. At this college they were stern on dress code. But they left Harold alone, I saw. He did look piercing and untouchable, his Korean near-veteranship a class of its own. They did love the Christian soldier, which he was not, but he had absolute freedom nonetheless as a lance corporal of Section 8. I was very happy for him. He had real dignity in his undershirt of the kind big-city Italians and serious white trash wore. The best thing was that he was unconscious of being out of line at all. It was hard to imagine Harold charging in the vanguard, or even hiding in a frozen hole, against the Communists in Korea, with his ascetic thinness, his hairy arms and chest, thrown against some garlicky horde and their bugles. Harold was not a coward, I’m sure, but I saw another thing suddenly about him, this partisan of Wilde and Errol Flynn: Harold was maybe doomed to no scandal of his own at all. He was too open, too egregious (a word I assure you I didn’t know then) to have one, especially there in his undershirt in the fifties. But he wanted one so badly, and one for all his friends like me. He fed wistfully on the few scraps thrown his way in our dull society.

When the symphony director and several doctors and lawyers were tracked down and filmed by city police in the old city auditorium — usually a venue for wrestling — preening in women’s underwear and swapping spit, Harold howled “Impeccable!” He hoped, he wanted so, for them all to be driven to the city limits sign and hurled out in shame down a notch of high weeds, their red panties up between their white buttocks. An M.D. was exposed in a zealous ring of coprophiliacs, sharing photographs at parties centering on soiled diapers. “There is a god! God is red!” In Harold’s senior year, here came a lawyer exposed for teen pornography, hauling girls over state lines. Again Harold trembled, but there was always a bit of sadness that he himself was not cut down and hauled off — he loved most the phrase “spirited away”—for some dreadful irredeemable disclosure.

Harold never worried himself about the life after scandal. He indicated that he was, in fact, carrying on lugubriously after a lurid bomb in his past (not the bomb, but a bomb), but I think he was playing me false, for the first time. He wanted it so much, and lived from one minor scandal to the next, but as I say, I never expected him to be blindsided by disclosure after I saw him that day when I was seventeen. I got the sudden sense of Harold as finished, even though he was shy of thirty, too transparent and happy in his sins. He would never get the scandale d’estime he so wanted. I had even thought that Harold wanted badly to be gay — queer, we said then — but could not bring it off. He was a theater queer around me sometimes, but you knew he couldn’t cross over the line, it wasn’t made for him, or he for it.

Harold was one of the few around who knew about the existence of Samuel Beckett, and he hailed the man, perfectly ordered in his obliquity for Harold — an Irishman close to Joyce, veteran of the French underground, who lived in Paris, wrote in French, and had absolutely no hope. Drama couldn’t get any better than Waiting for Godot , whose French title he would call out now and then like a charm, appropriate to nothing at hand I could see. Harold felt Godot was written in “direct spiritual telepathy” to veterans of Korea. He skipped nicely over the fact he never fought the war and I could agree that he was a telepathic cousin to them, because Harold was not, whatsoever, a phony. I was always struck by the fact he felt so sore and deep about particular people, and I felt dwarfish in my humanity, compared with him. Harold had seen Godot in Cambridge, and when it began playing in the South he drove his squat-rocket, mange-spotted ocher Studebaker far and wide to cities and college campuses to view it again. He would do the same for West Side Story , which he regarded as the highest achievement in musicals, ever. He saw the movie a number of times. Sometimes he’d take one or more of the odd girls with him, and once he asked me. He intended to drive all the way to Shreveport to see it again. He said I would see the kind of girl I wanted to marry in Natalie Wood and would hear the music of one of America’s few uncontested geniuses, Leonard Bernstein. Then we would dip back to see a production of Godot in Baton Rouge, which, he warned, I was not really old enough for but needed because even a dunce could tell it was “necessary” for any sensate member of the twentieth century.