Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

Where my passionately imaginative kindness for Ann came from must have been the dream. I’d never been this way before. I wasn’t ordinarily even courteous to folks I didn’t know. For two weeks I was miserable over her. Aw, that she ignored me, that she maybe wasn’t even conscious enough of me to be doing even that. I tried hard to dream about her again and get her to give me some message in the dream, but I couldn’t. The memory of her in the dream was waning, and I got in a desperate funk. I made a fool out of myself when she came by one day. I started singing a song, “I’ve got the money, honey, if you’ve got the time,” loud, putting myself directly in front of her face and doing a little hazardous bop stop. Ann looked at me worriedly, she did notice me, and then drew in her lip while glancing around it her crowd and deciding it was only her I was trying to entertain. Oh yeah, it was embarrassing as hell for me to have to do this. I was probably red in the face and silly as a sheik in drag, but I thought music might get her. She looked back at me once as she went on to the cafeteria. I was sure I had something moving now.

But no. I decided she was extremely shy. I couldn’t wait any longer, though. Next day I found her sitting in the Film Room by herself. I stepped up to the wall and printed out a note, went in and put it on the desk she was sitting on, then fled. The note read: “I dreamed about you and I like you very much. If you’re in trouble I want to help out Do you know, want to know what I dreamed about you (us)? Even though you might of thought it was stupid of me singing in the hall yesterday I meant it, I Have The Money Honey as in the song I was singing. I know I don’t have a very good voice. You know who my father is don’t you. I have $1000 in my bank account. Please call me at 212–5037 at Pierre Hills soon. You know that song ‘You Send Me’? I listen to it on the radio and think, You Send Me. Cares, Harry Monroe.”

She never called. I went out to the mattress factory in the afternoons and watched her from my old man’s glass office. It wrecked him with curiosity that I came down and watched the work. Ann worked behind a sewing machine in the shop just below us. She knew I was watching her. Then one day I noticed with a shock that she was violating the smoking ordinance. A great careless cloud boiled out of her mouth and floated up in the rafters. The old man chose this moment to rise out of his chair behind the desk and walk over to the shop window beside me, meaning, I think, to put his arm around my shoulder in a father-chum gesture. I knew he’d see Ann smoking. I could think of nothing very smart to distract him, but moved wildly, looking for some trick. There were several piles of job tickets on a table near me, and so I just dashed my hand through them and knocked them all over the floor. Sure enough, the old man stopped. He bent down and picked up a couple of handfuls, then rose up and stared at me.

“It was an accident. Let me help you,” I said.

“I worked on those tickets all morning,” the old man spoke, very dry. “It looked like you just … knocked them, son.”

“Something nervous happened to me.”

“That was crazy .” His face meant something deeper than this. I felt sorry for him; he started hopping from ticket to ticket on the floor.

“Let me help.”

“You can’t help. You go on home and … get well, boy. Sometimes you scare us. You know that? Donna says you close up your room in the afternoons and lie on the bed listening to the phonograph in the dark. What does that mean?”

The only answer to that was I liked to do it. Hell — kick a guy because he favors salt in his beer, peanuts in his soft drink, dark with his music: he happens to be a guy who likes to grip the sheets and close his eyes until greenish movies featuring him as the hero appear, changing scenes and milieux with the changing climes of music — Harry happy, Harry sad, Harry bitter or melancholic, Harry truculent, but always Harry marvelous, Harry celebrated by the high-class babes of Paris, Berlin, London, Rome, New York, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and of such shady places as Vicksburg, Natchez, Biloxi, Mobile, Savannah, and Charleston, twentieth-century holdouts of the romantic Southland, where it would be all magnolias, swamps and bayous, Spanish moss, cigarillos, piers, catfish, subtly brewed Bourbon drinks, and extravagantly well-dressed, complex, historic vagina, for Harry suave. Caving in a pier by his sheer presence. And lately, dreams of Malibu, California, in the simple cottage with Ann. Kick in a fellow’s head for wanting the dark, and the evocative phonograph. Very well.

I suffered in behalf of Ann and in behalf of, really, my-self, the way I happened to be. I had enough pride to be proud of it, though. Times were when I felt like God’s special friend, I was suffering so much. Like the Jews. We were reading about the unspeakable persecution of the Jews under Hitler in history about that time. Of course I had dug into all that lore years ago. The old teacher was married to a Jewish woman from Chicago. He held forth on the sins against the Jews as if he suffered a chronic nightmare one week a year about it. The atrocity photographs he showed were the only attraction of the year’s history class. He’d bring them out of an old cardboard folder and just sigh pitifully as he passed around the pictures. Guys would take his class for reason of the photographs alone. The pictures they were really awesome and sordid, showing open mouths and exposed pubes. The year I was under the old boy, a girl in my class threw up, and the principal came in the next day to say he couldn’t show those pictures around any more. So right in front of us the old boy got his folder together, put on his overcoat, caught up his briefcase, and quit the school, giving us some kind of hopeless salute. So what? everybody says. The only thing he was good at was telling about the Jews and about how time flies — tempus fugit, and all that, with a few other Latin phrases that seemed to grip him personally but never affected any of us. The principal read to us out of the textbook the rest of the year. And let me take this opportunity to say that this man, the principal, had an acute breath problem; air like from a cavern full of dead men came out of his mouth, and I caught it all, being on the front row, attempting as a sort of last ditch effort to create a scholarly air around myself by sitting there. I was doing so mediocrely at Dreams of Pines, and my parents wanted me to get in such a mighty college. They had the money. They wanted me at Harvard, or Princeton, or better yet, Columbia, in New York City. As I said, my old man was partial to New York because it had all that unimaginable money.

Another time I came to the factory to see Ann. I had managed to force myself into another dream about her. This time she was a kind of puppet that said, “I love you. I need you. I love you. I need you.” She’d taken off her clothes again and revealed a painted-doll type of nudity, showing two red dots and a black V that seemed varnished and inaccessible. The old man happened to be out of the office. I waved at her vigorously at the office window. She was talking to a stumpy fellow in gray coveralls and smoking a cigarette. When the fellow saw me, he hiked off instantly to another shop. Ann kept her eyes on me. Then she lifted up her hand and gave me the finger. I couldn’t believe it But the familiarity of the old signal somehow gave me some hope.

I followed her home. She was in some smoky car of the women’s car pool and I was in the black station wagon of old. They let her out at her slum-pocket and she walked rapidly over her lawn toward the house. I say lawn, but what it was was a soil flat that looked beaten out by a goon whose duty it was to let no sprig grow. I drove up with her and began calling her name. She seemed to be ignoring me and was almost running into her house, thinking to be rid of me in there. What a dump to run to for safety. I saw her doing this, and I could not believe the story about her having a baby. This was a furiously shy girl I was dealing with.