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

“You’re not even up to sophomoric yet, is your trouble, cat. Cats know things, they sense things. Young men like Elvis have left you light years behind.”

I got a thicker skin of the sullen around me. Oh yeah? What about your Asian women, the trolls you cultivate now? I wanted to say. What great sense was in that? And, and. . Harold did not wear his heart on his sleeve. He wore it on his forehead, throbbing away at you. I had a mother to scold me already, thank you.

“If you were worthy, I’d take you out for a drink, a liqueur. That’s what your mother expects me to do, teach you to drink,” he suddenly said, picking up on the very mother thought in my head, flicking me, chums again, on the suit sleeve. “I’m sorry for growling, cat. Really.”

“Likoor? Liquor?”

On Harold’s patient directions, the amused bartender at the Holiday Inn made us a sort of booze snow cone with crème de menthe. I guess I was so healthy and unpolluted, I felt it immediately, my first drink, or suck. I lit up like a pink sponge. All the world seemed at my feet, and I could barely stand the joy of Godot , Natalie Wood, and Harold in it at the same time. Even the city name, Baton Rouge, was vastly hip. Red stick, red stick. Very way out. Life was a long wonderful thing. It was so good you expected some official to show up and cancel it.

I tried to impress Harold with scandals I knew of myself, and told him about a shooting on a town square down south. A man had killed two policemen with a shotgun and gone home to threaten his own family, whereupon his oldest son ran him against a house with a truck and killed his own father with a.22, nine shots, the father yelling “Oh my God!” over and over. At the end, the son threw the pistol on the ground and said, “Daddy, why’d you make me do it? You knew I loved you.”

“No, no. That’s. . just baroque misery. So beastly obvious. Nothing but low, mean, stunned feelings result. Nothing is left but the mourners. It’s the province of our bard up at Oxford. Nobody throbs in shame, derided worldwide. Scandal pierces , is poignant, pi-quant, resonant . If I could reorder that sad thing they call a state fair. . You see, scandal is obsession, essence! Instead of the freak show, I’d have the heroes of scandal caged up while folks filed by to review them.”

“Review them? Then what?”

“Why, throw rotten fruit, eggs and excrement at them!” Harold gave that long girlish neigh that grabbed his throat after some of his insights, and too many heads turned in the Holiday Inn bar. He didn’t care.

“Scandal is delicious , little man. All we are is obsession and pain. That is all humans are. And when these wild things go public, and are met with howls, they ring out the only honest history we have! They are unbearable! Magnificent! Wicked! You read where the pathetic object goes off to psychiatric care or some phony drinking hospital, or a dull jail, but that’s only for the public, slamming the door shut on them. What they really are is raving on the heath, little man, in their honest unbearable humanity!”

So, in months afterward, I tried to achieve soul, or stand in the path of it so it would come to me. And I thought deeply about what I could do, what I had, who I was, to possibly rave on the heath someday. I wanted very much a rare, perhaps even dark, thing with a woman — Natalie Wood or her cousin, after I’d sent New York Slim off begging. My imagination could do nothing else for me, otherwise.

Harold sort of faded at the little college. I got tired of him, and at midyear a real Korean vet appeared as a late student on campus. He was much like Harold, they said, and Harold was very annoyed at being somewhat displaced and duplicated. The other fellow went crackers in a motel over in Jackson one night. Harold was called over by a local pastor to help minister to him. He didn’t like this role at all, although he did what he could. The man had true awful memories of Chosin Reservoir and was not poetic at all in his breakdown, also very real. Harold, you could tell, was fairly sorry to help him get back on his feet, and considered his insanity banal. I’d never seen Harold this ungenerous before, but I guess he was threatened by this man at the tiny college, where he used to hold forth among his desperate harem in the grill. He began giving “all of his entity” to a new large buxom girl with red cheeks who played clarinet in the orchestra, and I quit seeing much of him. He swore she was the one, an honest life’s passion. He was glad the waiting was over. I saw them at the drugstore together once. Harold was even paler and thinner and a good deal shorter than the girl. Drained by love, I guess. She had big calves and a very long lap, and seemed completely conquered by him. He was soon to graduate and become a high school teacher in a town north in the state that I didn’t think held much promise for scandal. He went off with no good-bye, the girl with him.

I just remembered that before he left I at last hit the mark on scandal for him, and he saw I was coming around.

“Okay, give me a worthy scandal, little man.” I was taller than Harold.

“This way. General MacArthur is discovered hunching a sheep just minutes after his ‘Old Soldiers Never Die, They Just Fade Away’ speech to a grateful Congress.”

“Finally. Perfect. Discovered by one of Truman’s aides, some nervous square from Missouri.”

The wild horsey shout.

My parents were much relieved, I detected, when Harold was finally away. The age, the dress, his bewildering pull, never set right for them, and my mother was disturbed when I told her he had found her attractive.

Now I was being a fine lad with my pal Horace, but not too fine, pulling out the bricks from the theater razement by honest sweat and toil, bored insane and almost to bed in Kosciusko. I looked down at the lobby desk from the balcony a long long time, but nobody came. It was just the old man sitting the night in the same chair, full speed ahead with his tangled stare, a silent movie of Godot even further gone into real life. Just to get a rise from him I spoke out the French title, like Harold loved to: “ En Attendant Godot! ” a little above normal speaking voice.

This worried the man, and he turned his head slowly around, then cocked it back at me, whose face denied anything had made a noise at all. He seemed very worried, even alarmed. Then for no good cause at all, I did my queer pantomime, slicking my eyebrows, running my tongue back and forth, my eyes big and avid, arms out as if to dive down on him. I was suddenly very angry at him for not being a woman. He was looking backward straight up at me. His arms began moving and a low rush of language I did not understand muttered from him.

I felt so good and healthy and showered, but I was using up all my potential here. My manhood was being sucked away by a dead town. My pal Horace opened the door of our room. He’d taken a nap to prepare himself for a real sleep in a minute, and gave a grogged palsy smile, feeling good too, with his body worked. I kept up the queer routine, which he always thought was a howl. He mimicked drop-kicking a homo in the groin. Horace was a bass player and quite a scholar, much better at books than I was. We passed much time mimicking the stone-dumb and depraved creatures of our state, especially the governor, who had recently suggested setting off large nuclear devices to blow open a canal way from the Tennessee River to Mobile.

“Come here. I want you to listen,” he said.

“Listen?”

“Come here.”

He took me to the window, which was open to the lukewarm Kosciusko evening, and told me not to look down, just listen.

At first I heard what I took to be just somebody mumbling on the sidewalk beneath us. Then a harmonica started up, very softly, lonely as a midnight highway dog. It was the blues, with no audience, for no money. For all my musical life, I’d never heard the blues erupt solitary and isolated like this. When the harmonica stopped, the voice went very high and strained in its grief — you couldn’t really tell whether it was a man or a woman.