Barry Hannah - High Lonesome

I heard that later in the night, however, Bandini had come out of the booth having shed his clothes. He had begun dancing and whirling. The boy who told me this commented that Bandini had an enormous penis, a thing almost not a part of him, it seemed. Nobody could believe it, and the band quit. Bandini lifted his penis and shook it all around at everybody, baiting each and every one, as it was quiet now.

“You can’t hurt me. Nothing you can do. You can’t hurt me.”

They were astounded but nobody seemed to mind that much. Bandini was in bad luck, however. There were two cops at the door and they broke through and hauled off Tiger Bandini, who still proclaimed himself hurt-proof. One drunk woman dancer began crying and saying what an awful thing that was, that it was too much like Jesus and it was a terrible, terrible thing to witness. She was hysterical.

I visited Bandini and Cruthers several times that year. I was running out of friends to drink with and it seemed that my worst anguish over a drink came on Sunday evenings when all the liquor was gone and the stores were shut. I think Bandini and Cruthers were moderating their drinking somewhat now after the incident at the bar. Cruthers I’d guess was simply a vast consumer and not strictly alcoholic. He simply drank whenever it was provided and you never saw him begging for a beer. He was a seasoned blithe leech and the campus provided him with a perennial supply of white liberal donors. He had a certain style and I never saw him thank anybody for a drink they had bought him. Bandini always seemed to have a few cold beers or the good part of a bottle left on Sunday nights.

The last night I visited he had two whole bottles and half a case of Heineken. It was his birthday and they had had a party yesterday, he said.

After three drinks I could not get a lift, only the poisoned flat feeling. I told Bandini I thought I was alcoholic. This made him very angry, not at me but at the idea.

“You are not! ” he insisted. “Don’t take the cheap way out. Nobody is really … anything. Everybody is just a collision.”

I wondered where he had got that. Around the room, all over the sofa and the bed, were books of history. I noticed markers were in all of them just a few pages deep. He seemed to be reading many at once instead of one at a time.

I was over there hours talking history, football, and great art. I started talking about women but that stopped everything for a while. There was a long pause during which I drank very rapidly and finally felt a little. Bandini had nothing to say about women. He looked at me vacantly. Cruthers said he liked sleeping with a fat woman when it came winter. He said he had children about who were pretty. Bandini was flat to this too.

I recalled then I had never seen Bandini with a woman. He was not gay, but I had never even seen him in conversation with a woman.

But he was getting emotional now, well into the good whiskey along with Cruthers, who seemed to be getting sadder.

Bandini put a tape of the soundtrack to the movie Platoon in a small player and a trumpet began crying out.

The two of them were moving into something and I’ll never forget it. Cruthers leaned against the window, and outside, the cat that Bandini had saved sat poised like a monitor on the other side of the screen with an orange moon behind it. They listened intently to the soundtrack and I felt to say anything would be like speaking aloud in church. Cruthers got to shuffling and became moodier and distant. Bandini raised his head and said to Cruthers softly, “Tell it all.”

The mood had gotten almost holy and eerie.

Cruthers began talking.

“I could sleep and make myself little but I always woke up the second anything anybody in range. I could smell them, my nose wake me up. I was on that tree crotch and had me a good limb with my honey and I start fucking her. They come over a hill five black pajamas in a row across like they was hunting rabbits. I blow all they heads off. Then I let myself down and each and every one I stomp they balls. But one of them a teenage girl just the top of her head blown back. I commence giving it to her mouth when I hold her up by the shoulders. That was the best I ever had.”

The room was as quiet as a tomb. Only Cruthers’s voice was going and the cat never moved. This must have been going on a long time. Cruthers finished the story and went in the kitchen to make himself another drink. There were going to be a lot more stories.

I looked down to Bandini and he was staring at the floor with a smile. His eyes were wet and he was in a hypnotic region.

“ Feel the turning and the twistings of all that, how Cruthers got there and the dispossessed without any mission but this rendezvous with a boy from Water Valley, Mississippi, and the gun he sleeps with in a tree, making love to it sixteen thousand miles from home. Nothing could stop it, nothing.”

I was stunned by the new deep voice of Bandini, and this whole language.

When I looked at him again I believe he had forgotten I was in the room. He smiled just slightly and I could see how deeply in love he was.

WHY ARE YOU ALIVE? THEY ASK ME.

It’s not the first time these two have been in here at that table almost in the street window there as you see. They march in and sit, light up, you bring them over that narrow plastic menu and they say Hello again. Why are you alive? The hateful thing is he looks just like me, the other one who doesn’t talk much. But he searches my face for the answer, intent. Why are you alive? But he smokes and smokes, my old brand when I was a smoker. Their bicycles both lean together almost on the glass outside. I thought at first they were Mormon, that I was the only outlet for whatever meanness they had. But that wasn’t so. They are no church.

Even a monkey can imitate life, the speaker says. Other creatures can be taught to make the gestures of a man. I saw a chicken in South Carolina once could count change, which you barely have to do. But you’re coming along nicely. You’ve got the worthless café doper down almost exactly right.

The one who looks too much like me seems in a hurry with his glances, like, When are you going to get out of my way, out of everything’s way, I wonder? The other says, It would seem nature gets lonely for moving life. God must be so lonely, such a party guy. Just something that treads by as an example, and you were elected for this space.

He points to this area of the café and makes both his hands walk across the tabletop. They could be two starfishes on a stage. You’re not even a decent hole, he goes on. Why aren’t you a woman? Then you might give some good man fifteen minutes’ peace.

It’s sort of a scandal you’re a male, yes. For godsake do something about your face. We’re eating here. Then he whispers: Where did you get the hair, where was that borrowed? I suppose to you your hair is somehow tragically significant and those shorts with your weenie legs and high-laced booties. Have you just come down off the mountain, dear friend, stamping out a forest fire, or have you just licked them with your spit and furred tongue? The other one just watches pale and with tired eyes like me. His clothes look like he bought them somewhere pricey though.

I think he will rise up and become me, absorb me, he is impatient for my space, is my feeling. But that must also mean there’s something good about me he has to have, and my silence leaves me in a superior position. He seems very tired from watching. I’d think he’s watched me at home too some way. The days keep going by and he just about has had it, is the feeling.

Across the room near the bar kneels Minnie Hinton. That same man is back at her table ordering his expensive whiskeys. Everything he does is costly. I believe he is a doctor going to law school in his Mercedes convertible. Something about the law and medicine and some field where you just sit on your butt being smart for high pay, as I understand. I believe there is a broomstick far up him. I sense the end knob of it is about at his Adam’s apple in his throat in there. He moves off the axle of this long stick in him. He is short with square shoulders, square face, and some gray curls in his black hair like somebody near a condo pool looking sidelong at lesser creatures with open contempt. Thirty years ago where he lives they would call a pad. The disdain of this man is thick, is the feeling, with Minnie knelt there in front of him. He is moving ahead, always moving, down from his townhouse on the square and he resents he’s on the ground with the others and having to walk where they walk, is my sense. It is my personal persuasion that he is taking it up the butt but he is frightened by this fact, he the doctor. You see others of his kind taking it up the butt and they trot around with a combination of fear and disdain, somebody on their trail, they have the best drugs, they must be quick. Minnie kneels down before him. She wrings her hands looking into his face. His face is quiet, almost without expression, but his mouth is moving all the time, whispering, you can barely hear anything over here with the crowd. He must know this. From him there is a long hiss that never quits.