Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

There within you, fin and sinew …

which she claimed was superb poetry by anybody’s standards. See the bifocals jackass, who made an unadulterated A in everything, fall apart at the jaw when she read out my name at the end of the poem. Of course, nobody else in the class gave a damn, and I personally was embarrassed by some of the extreme gentleness of the poem when she read it. I’d written it in a gust of all the culture 1 had in me. Our teacher had the knack of convincing you that you had to possess a museum full of culture before you deserved anything at all. You had to know all about the castles of England. You had to know about T. S. Eliot. You had to know about war-weary France.

She taught French too, and I got into it after a week in her literature class. She played the records of a French singer whose name was Edith Piaf. Her husband had brought the records back from occupied Germany. This Piaf woman sang like a petite untrained whore whose bed had been bombed out from under her; she trembled, with her voice from the bomb-metal soil to the bomb-dust sky. Oh, she could tell some stories, though I didn’t understand any of them. I remember “Non, je ne regrette rien” with those beautiful Paris r’s. I linked her exclusively with World War II. It was what the teacher said about the records coming from occupied Germany. And I could just imagine this little Piaf woman huddling down behind some statue as gunfire streaked up and down the rues and avenues . Our teacher had been to Paris and held forth on it unboundedly. The French tongue weighed heavy on my mind, and I feel it like a sinner that I never learned it very well. Even in college, I never understood but about half of Moliére. But the Piaf woman made me sentimental about war all over again. With the help of the two movies in Dream of Pines, which showed almost nothing else but war romances.

I grew sentimental about the casualties of the Korean War from Dream of Pines. I asked around about them until I must’ve been a great bore. We lost six boys from the town, as a matter of fact. The noblest casualty was the son of Ollie Sink, the mill baron. His boy was shot to death on Pork Chop Hill, but only after he’d rendered heroic duty as a corpsman. Ollie had a daughter remaining. Two colored boys from niggertown families I never knew were cut down. One of them was Harley Butte’s cousin, a boy who’d played baritone horn with Butte in Jones’s first-year band. Then one GI had returned safe from the war, but went in-sane for speed with his Mercury convertible when he got back and got killed at a driveway coming out of a joint into the highway. It was one of those crashes everybody in town claimed to have heard. Then I talked with a fellow who ran a sort of half-ass sporting goods store with his father. He was awfully bitter that nobody seemed to’ve cared about what had happened in Korea. He’d been in the conflict. He unbuttoned his shirt and showed me the worst purple stitched wounds I’ve ever seen. They looked like new wounds, in fact. The gooks had overrun a station where he was working the telephone and thrown in a grenade. He told me about the gooks throwing a woman naked down a hill and then sending down a man dressed in colonel’s uni-form to drag her half-living, screaming body up the hill by the hair, just so one GI would peep up enough that they could get a shot at him. This old boy claimed to have risen up and shot down the peasant dressed in colonel’s uniform, in spite of the threat. He claimed that the stone he was be-hind disappeared in shot from the gooks when he stood up, and that his survival was miraculous. Marveling about why he was still alive took up all his time. He held up a dusty mitt and spoke right into the pocket of it.

But in 1958 the girls in my class were hearing breathy, forlorn Elvis Presley over the big horn speakers at the parish fair. Royal American Shows furnished the main attractions there. It was October and chilly, with one rain a week. There were the animal exhibitions, the home arts tents, the rides, the concession booths, the freak shows, and two female variety acts, inside long tents with bleachers and a raised stage. One was “Rock” Brook’s show — white girls — and the other was “Harlem in Havana”—interblended girls all tending to a brown mustard color. Both of them had bands in rickety white plyboard bandstands. I attended the fair three nights in a row, and saw all the girls I knew turn away from their dates and seek as near a decorous spot as they could near the speakers carrying Elvis’s voice. Then their dates would have to sit by them and buy the cerealish hotdogs from the concessions and try to get their girlfriends to eat it while they were hearing Elvis finish his tune. I saw six or seven guys living through the agony of an Elvis song and a hotdog getting lukewarm. The girls would get into this state where their eyes wouldn’t focus and they would open their legs primly to make way for the moisture Elvis caused them. Of course I didn’t know that then. I just watched their dates gripping them and trying to resurge as lovers to them after the tune was over and they were on their way to the home arts tent.

I personally hoped that Elvis, that Hollywood redneck, would drown in his own spit. I hoped that he would knock up some nigger girl and have to marry her and that his career would crash into rust. My opinion of him had changed. I hated him for all the women he detracted from me and the rest of those pathetic amateurs taking girls over to the home arts tent. Now understand that I never had a date, not until senior year and the prpm, when you had to be a headline toad not to have a date. I never had the guts to try, before then. But I felt for the guys who were trying.

I was with another guy, walking past the false “You Must Be Eighteen” barrier to see the creamy mustard Negresses shake in their jeweled brassieres at “Harlem in Havana.” On Friday night at the dollar-fifty show this one gal came on five minutes before midnight and got down to it so you saw her totally nude and even her moss about five seconds before the strobe light went out. I couldn’t accept it; to my mind she became a life-size puppet toward the last. The guy I was with came out talking shrilly about how we’d seen a nude woman. But then the lights came on, and I saw the whole hurriedly screwed-together planks of the bleachers, the stage, and the bandstand, and I couldn’t believe I’d seen an actual nude woman in this sordid tent affair. But she’d been very pretty, with the three dark spots of nipple, nipple, and V’ed hair.

Back in the late fifties, with a couple of classmates standing the first time outside the “Harlem in Havana” tent pavilion and seeing the light-colored Negresses parade out to the outer stage to entice us inside with a few subdued but promising jerks to the band, the girls cloaked in sheeny robes and brassy wedge sandals, I first got the idea that playing hot music on a trumpet might be an exciting thing to do all one’s life. I looked away from the viciously weary faces of the girls to the bandstand balcony above them, where the “Harlem in Havana” banner draped. Up there was a Cuban-seeming fellow with a horn who wasn’t weary. He stood up playing the hell out of a trumpet. He could make that sucker scream, and the drummer was laying down something thick and Latin behind him, and the ferris-wheel lights were shooting out off the brass of his horn so it looked like and sounded like he was holding a wondrous rainbow bird with a golden throat in his hands.

There wasn’t any forgetting that.

Tonnie Ray was passionately busy all her days at Dream of Pines High. In junior high she was one of those neutral-looking skinnies very much concerned with the concept personality , because she didn’t think she had any, and she was right. So she got together with small groups of like spirits and went around telling, keeping, and betraying in-credibly inconsequential secrets, and that was about it, for Tonnie Ray Reese. She changed skirts every day, and was generally clean, and could be counted on to be scandalized by a shady joke or bad word. When “John was home” the first time, that is, when she had her first menstrual period, she missed a day of school. A girl actually asked about her when she came back. So she missed school every first day of her period for a while. She liked to create that mystery, and liked to reply in coy ways to anybody that asked about her absence — like she would say “I was with John,” which was sort of romantic too. She and her group were the giggling poultry of the recess yard, huddling here and there with their little egg-secrets. But in high school she was very busy; she had gotten desperate. The only boy who’d ever asked her out was an absolute grub. Tonnie Ray wanted to get into a good crowd so badly; she wanted in with the popular crowd. And now she’d quit her old crowd and was really of no crowd. All she thought of was emulating the popular set and it kept her busy and extremely nervous. She would sit by the popular cuties in the cafeteria and listen to all the recent anecdotes on parties and dates, and then laugh along knowledgeably at them. There were several girls like Tonnie Ray at Dream of Pines. They were all equally frantic. Frantic to please, if you were the right person. We called them roaches, mainly, I guess, because they were as addled as maimed insects, and sucked up to such social crumbs as were offered.