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

My mother was not enchanted. She was not happy about my trip with Harold, and much unhappier when she saw him, balding and with one of those cork-tipped Kools in the side of his mouth, behind the wheel of that car. I was a little embarrassed myself, because my folks put high stock in a nice car, and Mother was very sincere about appearances. I had told her Harold had ulcers, though I don’t know how it came up. But when she said “He shouldn’t smoke with those ulcers,” I could tell she was much concerned by more than that. Neither was Harold throwing any charm her way. He never had the automatic smarm and gush in the kit of most Southern men at introduction. I knew he was too experienced for that, but Mother didn’t like that he was a Korean near-vet, this old, just now going to college, and my friend. I waited for him to light up with just a bit of the rote charm, but he wouldn’t. He looked bored and impatient, thinking probably she owed him thanks for taking this probationary brat off her hands for a weekend. I was conscious that she thought he might be queer, so I just told her outright he wasn’t.

“Harold has many women,” I said, picking up my bag. She looked at me more suspiciously than ever. I just piled in, we left, and I was unsettled five ways as this rolling mutant of the V-2 went off simpering with its weak engine. Harold said nothing to cheer me up. Then he finally spoke, across the bridge after Vicksburg.

“Your father’s a very lucky man.”

“You know him?”

“No, fool. Your mother’s fine, A-plus fine. I’d die for her. A woman like that loved me, I’d cut off an arm.”

Again, Harold seemed to be talking way beyond his years, and I believe now he must have thought of himself as extremely old. But it was the first time I realized my mother was a well-dressed, finely put together woman, and I began looking at her anew after that. Harold sat so wordlessly in silhouette in the car — I wondered if he was stunned and putting the make on her . With my mother . What impeccable depravity, as he might have said.

I had a little dance combo at the high school. Harold had come to see us, and he bragged on my trumpet playing, many notes and very fast, but, unfortunately, no soul. Soul might come to me if I was patient, he said. It could happen to Southern boys, look at Elvis, and he went on to call Roy Orbison much better than Elvis. You must hear that voice, he said, but he failed to get it on the lousy scratching radio. What came in almost solid was a special kind of Studebaker music, mournful like somebody calling over another lost radio. He predicted men like that were going to make horns obsolete shortly, and Harold was dead right. By the time I finished college, nobody wanted to hear anything but guitar and voice. Even pianos were lucky to get a chip in here and there. I was destroyed by the absolute triumph of the greasers, the very class I and my cronies pointedly abhorred. Maybe there is no class hatred like the small towner with airs against unabashed white trash.

He was right about Natalie Wood. I had seen her once in Rebel Without a Cause but ignored her in favor of Dean. In West Side Story , though, as she was dancing and singing, and especially when she performed “Somewhere” amidst the gang horror of New York, I teared up and wanted her more than anything before in my life. She was it , tripled. Please wouldn’t she wait until I got famous and rich, and got some more height? Harold stood there, forever, as the credits rolled at the end. He seemed to be memorizing the name of every member who’d even carried a mop in the studio. I was smitten, looking down at the floor I was so charged, and still riding on that New York music.

We went to Baton Rouge to sleep at a Holiday Inn — very new and seeming swankier then — but on the way down Harold said maybe he should tell me this was a Negro production of Godot we were going to the next night.

“You’re kidding. This Beckett wrote for Negroes?”

“Grow up. He wrote for man , little man.”

“Oh. Well, sure.”

You would not believe how condescending and polite I was in that audience of Negroes in suits. The play was riveting and strange to me, and I thought maybe I was one of the few not getting it, just here and there a dose of sense. Nobody laughed, and I don’t know at all about the quality of the production. But it was a quiet smiling scandal that we were here at all, and I was glad to hear Harold’s earnest sighs now and again when a point of confusion and futility — I got that — was made. I felt very allied to the culture-hip scene. We were not going to put up with any racists once we were outside the theater either, me and my Negro friends, hearkening in our suits — goddamnit, let there be trouble. Our very class and righteousness would blow them away.

Out in the foyer, digging the crowd with Harold, I felt very promoted in my suit and Ivy League haircut, only I wanted a goatee very badly. Harold had pulled off to a wall for a smoke. I also wanted to say something on the mark.

“Way out, very. But really, how many of them you think really got it, Hare?”

He was disgusted, eyes closed in smoke.

“You tit. You little tits go right from blind ignorance to cynicism, never feeling a damned thing.”

“No, no, I feel. Miles Davis is my man.”

I was rescued by the appearance of the first great public faggot I’d ever witnessed. This black thing, tall and skinny as a drum major, was leading a trio of admirers out of the auditorium, hands curling and thrown out from his chest, squealing like a mule on fire, and dressed in something mauve and body-fit with a red necktie on it.

I smiled across the way at Harold, who had distanced himself, checked the near-empty theater, and began doing the pantomime I had learned off Ray Wiley, a worldly child of the army base who claimed to have encountered many queers. I wet both forefingers, smoothed my eyebrows with them, and formed my mouth in an O with my lips covering the hole, then held my arms out as if in a flying tackle. We conceived of queers as sort of helpless roving linebackers apt to dive on you and bury their faces in your loins. Wiley told many happy stories about how these men were discovered in their act in army lounges and stomped senseless. You could also use burning naphtha to rout them.

“What in hell?” Harold hissed, flicking eyes around the precincts like a spy.

He came over and grabbed my arm very strongly for such a skinny creature. Harold wore a formless blue serge suit with a clip-on green tie on his flat collar like a salesman at a funeral. I don’t believe he owned a button-down. He had on those heavy black executive shoes too. I noticed him red-eyed. He’d been crying quietly about Godot . Just as I’d wept tinnily for Natalie Wood.

“Behave, fool. You’re not in your own pathetic little country. Something wonderful has happened here, and you’re totally unmarked by it.”

“No. I’m marked , Hare. Truly marked, I swear. It was all there, man, straight on.”

“That and Our Town are the dramas of the century. Now you’ve seen both of them, thanks to me. What do you get from them? Zero. Out here queer-baiting. My God, you remind me of all those wry husbands dragged to the theater by their wives. Not a snowball’s chance in hell.”

“Look, man, I got something from it, all right? I only wish Natalie Wood was in it.”

Harold had pushed too far and I went sullen, out to his hopelessly square car, which looked even more like the grounded rocket of a very confused small nation. I thought about how stern old Harold was a great hypocrite, really, him with his album and glue-on straw from mouth to girl. The Studebaker left the campus with its weak hissing. He wouldn’t let it go.