Barry Hannah - High Lonesome

So were we good people then, because we did not follow through? No. Lovers are the most hideously selfish aberrations in any given territory.They are not nice, and careless to the degree of blind metal-hided rhinoceroses run amok. Multitudes of them cause wrecks and die in them. Ask the locals how sweet the wreckage of damned near everybody was around that little pube-rioting Juliet and her moon-whelp Romeo. Tornado in a razor factory, that’s what sweetness. That poor woman with her neck broken over the steering wheel was in their league, don’t tell me different. Without the stone picnic table, she’d have taken out all the help inside, and you’d have had the local scribes going for a year. Even the sad baritones on the box, too, tireless.

Once years ago I walked into a country juke saloon with a pistol to my head, but it was only a gag about music. Country folks don’t ever get tired of the same song, they just want it maybe faster and deeper now and then. Or maybe it wasn’t a gag. I’m just forty-two but sometimes very very weary.

I drive us, but I still do not have the main handle on whether we are in for construction or destruction. She has a way of looking at the floor and whispering no , unconsciously, eyes awfully flat and grim. Mary was absolutely right. I’m terribly glad she is my friend still. I’ll hate to leave her behind, little prissy happy-bosomed gal from Joplin, the only near-beauty I’ve ever known who would hang around without liquor at a parts store.

As you can see, behind the counter of my casual anarchy at the store, where only I know where parts are, I’ve had time to think and come up with some high county epigrams of my own, because I have not found this life particularly pleasant and it’s for damned sure my customers, the wheeled doofuses bred with a bad carburetor in their genes, aren’t going to show me anything new. If I were greatly handsome or had promise I might kill myself, but I’m not giving wags the pleasure nor Mary the trouble. The wags have a bad enough time coping with internal combustion. What would they say about me anyway? I have no problems. I’m begging for minor disasters, like several wealthy people I’ve known. I couldn’t cope with the options of wealth. The five or six I have in my present condition sometimes paralyze me. Also, the wealthy like money and are often so paranoid they pay someone to be after them, just so they will know distinctly who it is. To the man, every wealthy shop owner around the town circle here has a spread middle, a permanent bent neck toward the sidewalk from counting and playing with themselves, and nervous shoulders as if expecting to be poleaxed by a stranger from behind.

In my brief mournful summer in New York City years ago, I was attempting to get myself across as something I’m unwilling to discuss. All right, painting. Hustling my plain local stuff during the height of Warholism, inviting half smiles of almost Martian disdain from gallery owners, and with nobody else between me and them as I could guess they were begging there to be, since I was using precious seconds of their eyesight on my “work.” I had at this time the almost mystic confidence of the autoanointed third-rater and must have sounded very much like Harry Truman.

I met a boy my age who had inherited vast wealth and seemed to like me. He had no job, did nothing but wander about, and I saw him exit one or two parties with his head down, looking run-over, with people gazing at his back. I had never met a true creep — a slug — although we used the item handily all through high school and college in Columbia (Missouri). But here was your real specie at last, a young man who could buy anything and had omitted to buy (possible, of course) a personality. He just hung around. I became his favorite and he would show up at bar dates uninvited, somehow finding out about my appointment with another person around Charles Street in the Village. He would appear, then stare at me, then at the floor; now with his face to me, turned again, after an unsettling hungry look. He wasn’t gay as I suspected. He was nothing, just some sort of thing seeking my shade.

I had got to New York somehow without being conscious of Thomas Hart Benton, an artist from practically my own backyard — a real artist whose work, had I known it, would have discouraged me from New York entirely. But certain other artists loved the fact I’d never heard of him, and with them I was promoted in esteem. We were drinking a lot of cheap drinks in a cheap tavern and talking over my possibilities as a new savage (dream on), when this slug person, this creep, appeared again, looking at me, then down. I was drunk and angry over my treatment by the galleries, so I let him have it, very unlike myself. But he really was too much. I charged: What do you want? What are you after? Why are you here? Why aren’t you dead? His narrow shoulders, the cocked-over head with chubby face — I can still see it — the small burned dirty eyes. I watched real pain and a faint smile come over him, such a hopeless and yet triumphant look as I’d never seen. He turned around, and after saying “I’m so sorry” with his back to me, he left and I didn’t see him for a year.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was my artist pal, a boy from Maine not as drunk as I was. “You’re the fourth one this summer. He stays and comes and interlopes and then an eruption from somebody like you he’s been begging for, and he goes out whipped. I think he loves it, I know he does. He works you for abuse, gets it, and now he might be off stroking himself. Then he moves to another person.”

I was staggered and instantly sober. My feel for the whole city was different now. I knew I was a loser too, but I was almost sick and very angry at what a fellow with every option like the creep could bring himself to. I thought I could even still smell his stale white oily body in here, like old margarine.

The rest of this story goes into the next summer when I was in the city just a week to flush out old mediocrities, and we were turning warm in mutual condolences, we less hopeful floggers, in the same tavern, when Elton, the creep, came in with the best-looking woman I had ever seen anywhere. He was unchanged, slumping, holding his mouth like a stunned halibut’s, less than zero to say. Nobody had ever known where, under what cold bricks he lived. He was always just abruptly there, parachuted it seemed — that sudden — out of some ghastly greasy aerial pollution, face like the cunt of a possum. But the woman, why, she was with him and not vomiting, not vomiting at all. I think she was Brazilian. Pecan-skinned, silver-heeled, high-breasted all-out for summer. The despair in the tavern you could dip with a cup, and I wet my pants in sorrow and desire. That poor beauty, bought outright by Elton as his wife, was so reamed and gouged within one minute by every straight male eye in the bar she’d have been sausage under a few rags and heels had thought taken action. Elton — I did catch it, didn’t I? — looked at me briefly and lifted one upper lip in what I think was an attempt at a smirk, although it was hard to tell with the dead eyes. All he did was stand there with her fifteen minutes. Neither one of them even had a drink. They said he was all sober now but he was such a creep nobody had ever known he was alcoholic, and if changed he looked worse now. Still, I believe I caught his smirk, which he did not have character enough to maintain. Then they strolled out, or she did, and he had his doughy oily palm on her crease, a whole other order of butt it was so good, and then I suffered the gnashing tragedy of never seeing her again, ever, in my life.

This I relay partially to explain I have not failed in only one place. No, I am cosmopolitan, tested. Also to assure you as in those fat bright books you might read that the truly wealthy are often true worms. But not so much this as to warn myself about the surgeon’s wife, especially waiting right now in the Audi for her special abuse, maybe, a different sort than Elton’s, but I’ve an edge of sickness about this too. Something in her leans over on me out of her soul, a quality of boiled spaghetti. She appears and sits and waits a bit too much. She has told me that her first child (she has another) was created by her hand from the condom of her husband, herself alone in the bathroom while he slept, in the slyness of determined motherhood. He did not want children now, in school. Why’d she tell me? Does she see it as adorable or valiant? Is it a testimony of slightly appalling urges in the womb or an ugly little act of deceit and control? I can’t tell, honestly. She appears and sits and waits a bit too much. There is, without my having possessed her yet, a bit too much preparation and dullish watchful stare about her, and a persistent slackening in her jaws, though she has a red marvelous mouth, as if she were sucking at me in bits and might become at her climacteric all mouth and vacuum, oral entirely, have me down the maw with only my poor shoes sticking out. I fear in short that she is a creep. But that’s not even the worst fear. As with Elton I know now I was frightened he wanted near me because I was a creep. Creeps go for creeps and the veterans know who they are instantly. Because a loser like me can have honor — as the used have honor and life even in their outrage, while the user has mere habit — and the creep none. Was evil ever this low, banal, and gaudy? Imagine Elton, who was indeed the picture of Mr. Trump without money, but more slumped and even oilier, but the same mouth and dead eyes. And Elton went directly to me . I knew the others he went to: they were at least latent creeps, without exception — the common denominator my friend from Maine left out.