Barry Hannah - High Lonesome

I could be Fagmost, on the other hand. He is that drunkard always sick under the stands after every ball game, puking up his guts but smiling. He screams at the team for three solid hours and then you will see him dancing alone in the lowbrow clubs around town. You see him on his hands and knees but making kick motions like a dancer shot down. Then one night two policemen piled into the crowd and dragged Fagmost off, him all wet in his lumpy flower shirt and dirty beard. He never claimed to be nice like everybody around here aspires to. I am nice, I am all right. What a nothing to be said, no? Why, he turned on the television just to get another herd of foreigners to scream at. He fed stray cats is the best thing I know about him. I could be him, but I doubt I have the staying power to be a good drunkard. You see Fagmost trying to eat a hearty meal, the way his lips quiver and he scrapes around at it, this man can move you with his lack of memory and gut persistence. He is smiling, mostly, and you see him back under the stands of the football stadium, puking without a thought of the well-dressed women around him and all the while wearing his smile. My Lord if I, say, had a good four-year war behind me and was a hopeless lush carried down the street by a flock of children on Memorial Day, that would be something like Fagmost, that would be Fagmostian, I wouldn’t have to stand for any of this over at that table. Nobody wants to take the time to insult Fagmost, he is so out there.

But I just want to eat candy and drink three sodas with it then fall asleep with a sweat on me watching some women prisoners in slips on the television, wanting to be their guard. I would even wear a slip too just for fun because all women know how to talk. I would like to have a poison ivy rash and have them scratch it for me, all in their slips and their little folkways to cure what ails you.

Or I could be Jimmy with Mr. Beckett in the alley. Jimmy wears a football helmet and Mr. Beckett follows him with a cane. They are inseparable. Jimmy pigeon-toed and hunchbacked. He gimps along slowly looking at the pavement, while Mr. Beckett follows. Then he will strike Jimmy over the helmet with the cane, blap, and there you are their never-ending street playhouse. Jimmy goes into a howling fit to remark on his discomfiture and sends Mr. Beckett down to hell several times. Then Mr. Beckett extends his hand, apologizes. They make up and move on to drink coffee in the town café across the street under a marlin on the walls. They are feebleminded but they have structure and design such as discussed in that class at the UI took. Wouldn’t you imagine Mr. Beckett is a god, and Jimmy, looking for cans to cash in, his faithful servant? While I serve and yet never serve anything.

While the two are finishing up their meal I don’t have to look over there. I can feel that one’s eyes on my back. The clock is hard to watch too the way it is rushing forward and the hands trying to get out like snakes. It is hot on my back and the one at the table is running after me down a gray alley with the air heavy in hot meat exhaust every damned pizza ever consumed like preflatulence of the eating mobs. I’m out of breath just turning around and my bare legs over my boots look like thin milky sticks to run on, they can’t carry on much farther, I should have done more exercise like God intends for real men only I’m in love with my weakness, women in slips could stand and lie all around me licking my disease, they go for weak men you know, oh yes they love nothing better than a bad poet who needs all kinds of help and understanding even to finish out a new poem about self-abuse. The man handles me somehow, yes his fingers go around my neck become snakes off the clock, next the way he steps into me with his knees behind my knees, paralyzing me to make me buckle like somebody collapsed in love. He is like smoke and he wears me like a suit or maybe just underwear.

My mother, the strong one, taller than both my father and me, she was always at the window nervous, looking out at the flatness of the airfields where my father worked. She said she wondered why we needed to go to the moon, we already lived on it, we had lived on many moons, one moon-scape to the next. They are making my mind flat, she said, and she never complained much. My tits are going flat, my breast does not swell, no heart in it I can see out there honestly try as I might, then try to love again in another place, wherever God has furnished another pool table for their little games. You can’t just peer out to the flats forever. I can’t love again, I can’t. You will have to make do with some younger gypsy with huge breasts. Even in her depression my mother was strong, you see. But she pitied me and all the ones over the world who were never quite dead but little else. That is the trouble with everything, she said, new people are not quite loved like I can’t quite love you or your father. On the streets in the airports in the churches in the stores they are not quite loved. You can see it in almost everybody’s eyes. They are paying for somebody to love them, they are trying to make up somebody who loves them, but everybody’s soul is stretched out flat, we just are things to sit something on like airfields. There are too many places too many pictures. Nobody can get to them except crazy people like my own father your granddaddy. He was crazy but he taught me to love and be loved.

My father, I just remembered. He was working on a strange gas with a space name to power a weapon that in a single helicopter you had the gunforce to level a block in Manhattan at midnight in a storm. He worked always deep into the night even at home and he loved those Winston cigarettes. When he was diagnosed with lung cancer his doctor suggested he sue the government because that space gas had a direct bearing and he the doctor would testify so. But see this, my father was a patriot as well as a small genius and he could not in good heart as he put it, and with cancerous lungs as he could have, sue his own government even if it would provide millions and Harvard for me and a palace in the mountains for my mother although my mother always said she just wanted one small Ozark to live on at last, she was from Arkansas and that’s all she dreamed of, just the one little mountain. So he just blamed the Winstons alone and nobody knew of the other until his partner later died too with tumors like fists in his head and lungs and liver.

The very next day after my father was diagnosed, I mean the next day after that ceremony on the tarmac, helicopters saluting him from overhead in a squadron, I watched where he got the award. In Louisiana. The moss hung from the limbs of the pines and the sun up like bright hell, the sky just stupid and blue, a skinny squirrel running behind the grandstand over the tarmac like some rat making a protest, all that pavement and bop bop bop ping metal sound overhead. Before he began crying and getting smaller, he said, Yes, there are too many. God bless war otherwise the pestilential hordes reaching up to level us. There you’d really have your flat plains. You can never trust an armed corporal, boys and girls, something’s different there no matter what you read. Trust this, history will always create a monster to harvest the millions. We should worship the helicopter, boy, god of our times, Hitler Stalin Mao, Hussein, all of them corporals. There is not even such a thing as a personal soul in many countries. The souls were dead already waiting for Marx, all he was was the final announcement. I am dying for you, I have had hell so you may carry on. Love me, every breathing motherfucker around me. I give you my lungs and heart to eat thereof. I taste like a sword.

When I turn to take the bill over, the man who looks just like me is standing right in my face. His meal is all in his breath.