Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

“Go on,” she said.

“That’s all. But I mean—”

“Lenny. I asked you before not to go off following your faith too far.” She gripped his arm tightly with both hands. He liked it. “Just drop all this, okay? Don’t think about it anymore. Stay with us. Stay with me.”

“I want to see you tonight,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

“I want to sleep with you.”

“We’re going to,” she said.

“I feel like I’m willing to try. I mean, with you.”

“I’m glad.”

“Even, you know, with Marla in the picture and all.”

“I’m glad,” she said.

English drove home and got his jacket and then walked, shivering, through the Provincetown night. People were saying that a cold spring meant an early heat wave in summer. Off the hill and nearer the water it was windless, and warm in a way that was accentuated by the many newly opened restaurants spilling their light into the street. There were plenty of people in town, with the bulk of them to come in the next two days to enjoy the first weekend of the season, the bargain gift shopping and the annual Blessing of the Fleet, when fishermen and pleasure boaters would glide past the town wharf under the slowly waving scepter of some clergyman or other. It was almost eleven now. Couples walked home from late dinners. Two women in high heels sounded just like a horse clip-clopping by. From down an alley came the sorrows of a trumpet letting out soft jazz. A man passed him walking an invisible dog — a novelty item, a stiffened leash and collar that bobbed along ahead of him, empty. English crossed the street to avoid a gang of meaty lesbians and screaming queens who bore down on him with their arms locked around each other’s shoulders, singing, “Faggots and fairies and dykes, oh my! Faggots and fairies and dykes, oh my!” He liked the look of things. The town was getting a woozy, criminal feeling that rather matched his own.

He went into a basement tavern on Commercial. He remembered drinking here with Berryman and Smith, the overanxious Portuguese disc jockey. He didn’t much care for basements, but he thought it might be a place the tourists hadn’t yet located and filled.

He heard Phil, the cabdriver, speaking loudly inside before he was halfway down the stairs. The jukebox was playing “Misty Blue.”

Phil sat at the bar between a thin gay man with the arching posture of a heavy-headed blossom and Nguyen Minh, the Vietnamese factory worker. Somebody was laughing at the words of a blond and cute but quite butch-voiced transvestite whom English had noticed on the streets several times this winter. English couldn’t hear what she was saying.

Phil was telling Nguyen Minh: “And I asked myself: The way you are now, would your eight-year-old self approve of you? Would your eight-year-old self — that totally innocent child, with those ideals that are real, man, and human — would he approve?”

The tall thin man got up and headed out the door.

“No fucking way. I was betraying that kid,” Phil said, “my childhood self. I’m talking about the real feeling of like if you stuck a bayonet in your buddy’s back, not just ripping off a friend or something like that, but killing, death. You know what I’m saying, man?” Phil’s face was crushed under the pressure of his pain. “I don’t think you know the kind of treachery I’m talking about.”

“Whatever’s on tap,” English said, and the bartender drew him a glass of beer.

Phil’s troubled scrutiny had floated over and snagged on the cross-dresser. “You never tasted that kind of treachery, man.”

The cross-dresser smiled and shrugged. Her eyes were very red.

“But then, and then it was like,” Phil said, holding his hand out before him, gazing cross-eyed into his open palm as if this memory rested right there in it, “the ghost of John Lennon appeared to me. And he said, Fuck that, he can’t judge you, because an eight-year-old doesn’t have the knowledge, man. Those ideals of yesterday, even everything you believed two hours ago, man — fuck that. We don’t need to apologize to our past selves. They were the ones who turned into us. We are just who we are. You know?” he asked the cross-dresser.

She sat in splendid isolation, putting her very red lips around the cherry from her Manhattan.

“Mister Hey There,” Phil said, noticing English. “What the fuck. Right?”

“Hi,” English said.

“How’s progress?”

English raised his glass and shrugged.

“A little better every minute, huh?”

“You got it,” English said.

“No, but — do you get my drift? Hey, brother, one thing: I remember I said a couple of things about our mutual friend. Ell Ess would be the initials. May she remain nameless.”

“Nameless, okay.”

“I hear you’re still going with her.”

“Going with who?” the transvestite said.

“Somebody nameless,” said English.

“So I’m sorry if I stepped on anybody’s toes,” Phil said.

“Aah,” English said. “It’s nothing, man.”

“I hardly even know her, except we grew up in the same town, for whatever that’s worth, okay? She’s a good person,” Phil said. “She’s a good person.” He flexed his hands. “She’s a good person, but she’s mentally ill. I don’t know.”

Nguyen Minh wiped his mouth with the palm of his hand and entered the conversation. “I’m very quite drunk now,” he said to Phil.

“We were there, man,” Phil reminded him. “You in the air and me on the ground. We kicked their asses.”

Nguyen lifted his glass to the cross-dresser. “I am a gook,” he said.

English toasted him with a double Scotch rocks, the first swallow of which changed his smile because it went down like poison. “What’s your name?” he asked the blond-wigged man.

“Tanny,” the transvestite said, and started singing “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” in a taught, professional baritone.

“MA-AH-AY WARE! HOUSE! EYES,” Phil screeched, joining in, “MY ARAY-BEEYUN DRUMS. SHOULD I LEAVE THEM BY YO GATE?”

He broke off, letting Tanny sing, “Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?” all by herself.

Sitting here with the tavern glow shining softly on the blond bar, the light touching the self-described gook’s somewhat greasy cheeks in a way he could never touch back, filling the glasses with something nobody could drink, English felt his heart tearing on loneliness like a diamond. “I want to apologize to you both,” he said, “for dodging the draft.” He drank down his drink. “I could have gone in. My asthma wasn’t that bad.”

Phil only stared at him. Nguyen smiled as if aping a photo of a smiling man.

“Okay,” English said, “there.”

“Anything else?” Phil asked.

“Yes,” English said. “I may need a gun.”

“They’re everywhere, everywhere, everywhere,” Phil assured him.

“Ah. The violence,” Nguyen said, shaking his head.

“It’s not that,” English said.

“Yes, it is,” Nguyen said.

Phil raised his glass. “To the ghost of John Lennon, dead these several months.”

Something lurking in English’s mind now stepped into the light, the shadow became a shade — not by any means the ghost of a dead rock idol, but a question to haunt him: the mystical message Phil had been describing, the greetings from John Lennon, what if a person heeded all such inner rebop, would he be damned or saved? How quickly would a person’s life progress along its lines if he followed every impulse as if it started from God? How much more quickly would he be healed? Or how much faster destroyed? Saints had done that. Also mass killers, and wreakers of a more secret mayhem, witches and cultists and vampires and so on. I’m your God, come here. But you’re standing in a storm, God. Yes, and I’m calling you to come here. But how do I know you’re God? Because I’m all that’s in front of you, and all that was behind you is gone: choose the storm or you get nothing.