Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

The cop has come up three feet from the crowd and is grabbing hands of people who are still trying to get coins to the musicians. Fellows around me start throwing the coins hard; the crowd starts stoning the cop with quarters and nickels. People keep back the dimes because they don’t carry well. The cop begins to get stung; some of these low-bred bastards around me are throwing at his face, and pink slices appear on his cheeks as he tries to hold down the hands. A huge fifty-cent piece sails against his brow and blood falls down through his lashes almost instantaneously. The action pauses. Then everybody falls back a little and starts throwing even harder. The coins sail in coveys toward the cop. I suddenly realize that the idea is to throw your coins through the cop to reach the musicians. But what a cop! I think. He’s still standing with outspread arms, club in one hand, blood streaming off his forehead into his eye, and a look of placid boredom on his wide face, while the coins pelt him. I got the feeling he considered all this child’s play, with him as the resigned papa. Behind him the Negro man is spread-eagled on the sidewalk with hands teaching and heels scraping, trying to drag in the falling money. The knees show through the holes in his trousers. The poor bastard was trying to make a net out of himself. This does it; I throw my coins softly toward the walk, but a couple of them drop on the cop’s knee. Mine was the last bunch. Everybody else had run out of coins. The cop sees me and comes alive. “Oh. A smart-ass, huh?” He wades into the crowd and they split, turning back their faces toward me. I’m too shocked to move, and feel the girl’s hand rip out of mine. Without hesitation, as I turn away from him, he whales me across the back with the billy. My body leaves the ground and I come down crumbled in pain and running amuck, shouting “God damn!” The cop’s shoes thunder behind me. “All right, Mister Filth-mouth! Go talk that one over!” he roars. Then he crunches me a farewell one across the back of my thigh with that piece of lumber again. It was a nasty, scalding hurt, but I stayed on my feet out of sheer panic and found myself running low on the sidewalk, legs and shoes flying by my face. I stopped by the fountain and looked back. Why? Why? I’m wondering. Why did he hit me? What’s wrong with this place? I felt spooky all of a sudden in this city. Those concrete rungs around the square pool seemed unnaturally gray and morbid to me. The brownstone apartments were stuck together with the spit of old, crazy men. The ache of my backbone and thigh taught me there was no happiness in this place.

The bald-headed man in the army jacket is holding the sleeve of the cop’s uniform and berating the cop with obscenities. The cop is shaking his head. The beggars are slinking off, sea cap and neck of ukulele high. The Brooklynite is facing my way giving a shrug I can make out from fifty yards. “Who …?!” I can’t help hollering out at all of them. “Who am I to get done like that? … What kind of country do you think this is? … This place has got some goddamn rules, hasn’t it?”

“No sir. You poor bayah-bee,” comes this voice from be-side me.

I haven’t been deserted by my girls. They are all four standing beside me, the redhead foremost; I notice that each girl is wearing differently colored pastel tennis shoes of the same type — there’s blue, orange, yellow, and violet. The redhead reminds me of everything Ann Mick could have been if she’d taken care of herself. Her name is Sylvia; her mouth is constantly red and wet, and she’s used some chalk over her eyes to make the upper half of her face glow dull green and sultry. The others are not beauties, but they all have a little style. I mean they poise around on their calves giving the impression they have the universe by the tail, being engaged to be married and having run through all the preliminaries of romance. I can pass them by without any grief, but as for the redhead who’s offered to play at love tonight with me — even the hint of red in a woman’s hair makes me gimp around like a pogo stick; puts me up in the air like a pole-vaulter hung up over the bar and dreaming about his shocking soft fall into the sawdust.

“He hit you, didn’t he?” remarks the brunette.

“Poor bayah-bee! I was trying to tell you about this crazy place and get you away from that policeman,” says the red-haired girl. She put her arm around me so far her fingers met my navel. “Now you’re hurt. Listen: we were in Central Park one afternoon and this Negro man jumped out of the bushes and started hitting this woman and she just laughed. Laifed ”

“Oh, Sylvie. It was apparent that they knew each other very well,” says another girl, whose face was like that of a cat without any hair.

“It was a white lady,” Sylvia explained.

“Oh, Sylvia,” the others sighed, exasperated.

“You sound like you’re from the South,” I said.

It turned out they all were from the South. They were coeds from the University of North Carolina doing a summer session at N.Y.U., principally for the reason of living in New York for eight weeks. Their stay was drawing to a close. They had had to study to make their grades, and nothing of particular excitement had happened to them, until me. They thought my getting beat up by the cop was exquisite. “I’ll bet that hurt,” says the humid-eye girl with a blotched yellow face. I never could figure out whether it was a peeling suntan or a disease. “You were really uncontrollable dancing and throwing those coins at the cop. You were really an item. How old are you?” I lied. I told them I was from Tulane up here in New York to learn jazz and told them other false halves of stories proving that New Or-leans, my birthplace and ancient lover, was holding its breath waiting for my return to one of the premium night clubs on Bourbon Street. I had a lot of Italian and French names at my disposal, and managed to lapse imperceptibly into a Cajun dialect that had them all groping to understand me. I recited straight through a brief history of the Acadians (I did learn something in Louisiana history!), which really put them on the marvel. Except for Sylvia, the girls were tepid academic sorts. I caught on that they resented Sylvia’s betraying they were all from the South. And as for their speech, I couldn’t understand much, with them trying so hard to lose their accents and bend their mouths around some weary idea of New Yorker dialect. A lot of sputtering and pronouncing of Ayie for I . The thicker they came on with the New York, the thicker I came on with the Cajun.

We walked past places like the Gaslight Cafe and several clothing and music shops on MacDougal Street and went off into an alley where the door of their apartment was. Sylvia kept her arm around me and mentioned the fact that I must be still hurting and made other soft, nurselike sounds in my ear that the others couldn’t hear. She was truly one of the sweet girls of the South. She never used bad language, a cigarette was a tremendous experience to her, she was extravagantly interested in me, she had popping, lashy gray eyes, and the innocence of a World War One bandage-mistress. She kept her skirt over her knees and sat sideways.

The Wine Party amounted to one bottle of champagne in the house and me as the only visitor from the other sex. The furniture was benches, scattered cushions, and books with notebook paper leaking out. The girls drank half a glass of champagne and started complaining immediately of being sleepy and drunk. That left me half of the magnum to myself, and I was feeling no pain by the second glass. One of them got up and played a Maynard Ferguson record on a dinky portable phonograph, for my benefit, I guess. Ferg depressed me, as usual, sailing about three registers above his band where there weren’t even any notes, as far as I knew. I told them — sour grapes — that Ferg was quite all right as a “novelty” trumpet man. It got them excited that I was able to cut a pure genius like Maynard. “ Technically , he’s competent,” I threw in, implying there was something lacking about him that certainly no one in this room except me could possibly understand. Then I became the intellectual idol of the crowd.