Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

I left the apartment with Sylvia hanging on my jaws thrusting her tongue back in my throat with French kissing. Pop! I’m free. Out in the alley walking toward MacDougal Street, breathing the warm midnight of the hottest June New York has had in a while — says the radio back at the hotel. I mount the stairs of my hotel and lie down to sleep on a bed between a trumpet-player from Oklahoma and another one from Oregon, high school prodigies like me. I think our hotel had a name like The Bibi. Anyway, it was in walking distance of N.Y.U.

Perrino, still sporting his horseshoe beard and instructing trumpets, was odd. Eastman had given him license. He came to us wailing; he had his hands over his head, and you could see written back in his eyes that he had obtained some ruinous Ph.D. from somewhere. His tie knot waggled down on his open collar, and his clothes were like bandages coming apart over a horrid wound to his chest and soul. He wore sandals over black socks, which seemed to represent the same anguish at his feet. He was slightly chubby, with bags under his eyes like rotting bananas, and behaved as if he were the last gasp of Italianism in America. We rehearsed a Shostakovich brass chorale under him. He was never satisfied. He shrieked and kicked over the stand, bellowing that we were all out of tune.

Toward the last of the clinic session he caught several of us watching the girls through the window of the basement while we were playing. He charged over and raked down the Venetian blinds.

“You watch me ” he screamed. “What you think I’m doing with this stick — picking my nose with it?” He ran the baton in and out of his fist and closed his eyes, then opened them hugely. Then he grew cold and bit both his lips. “I hear all these original styles going round this room. All you little green-asses want to have some style , don’t you? You want to be big jazz men. Huh?” He collapsed, hands to knees.

“What?!!” Nobody had said anything. “Listen here, shit-ties, don’t try to distinguish yourself with an original tone when you’re just beginners. You play all the notes set in front of you for a while, and you’ll develop some style out of that . Music. You have to know enough of it. Music will teach you your tone and your style. Trust it. Do the notes,” he pleaded. He ran toward the back of our ensemble. “Don’t look, but I’m getting out my thing and laying it on the shoulder of one of you boys. Nobody knows whose shoulder I’ve got my thing on.” We heard a sound like a belt buckle hitting the floor. Nobody looked back. “You must play this chorale as a team , nobody having any style, or I’ll come around and lay it on your shoulder. The man who has the most individual style has a thing laying on his shoulder!” He counted us to start, and we played the chorale in a perfect, soft harmony, nobody wanting to stand out.

“That’s more like what Shostakovich wanted!” Perrino exclaimed. He jumped up and down to the front of the ensemble. “Only it was too timid. What’s the matter? Is any-body afraid of getting an old thing in his mouth ? Do you take me for a fairy ?” He started limp-wristing and lisping around in a great imitation of the Prince of Queers. “You silly gooses!” he hissed to us.

Oh, Perrino was odd. But his lesson stuck. Forever after that I hesitated to play with any volume or any particular style for fear some dago wild man would be sneaking up behind me to lay his prod on my shoulder. Perrino had a great bit to do with destroying me as a jazz man. Our last night we did a free brass concert on the mall in Central Park. The public loved us, and Perrino wore a sharp blue suit and intimated over the microphone that he had taken us bunch of yokels and whipped us into style in about two nights. Perrino was a monstrous bastard from the word go.

My last night in New York, I went out by myself again and sat on the Washington Square fountain. Everybody was having a good time. The pool was thick with people sloshing about. It turned dusk. I saw the bald-headed fellow in the army jacket again. He was having a water fight with the side of the pool. Then a big Negro waded up to me. It was about dusk then. “Y’know, man. I know I lead an essentially nonexistent existence,” he says. He brought up his hands, and they dripped water all over my pants. Then he lay down in the pool and seemed worlds away from me. I couldn’t answer him; I didn’t know what he meant. But I liked his calling me man . I did like that. Everybody at home was so fond of calling me son and Harry, in condescending tones of voice. “Y’know, man …” echoed through me. It was as if he’d known I’d had my first woman. “Y’know, man … Y’know, man.” New York and Washington Square weren’t so bad. All those adult types out in the pool having such a good time. And at least one man who took me seriously. Two men! I thought. That cop wouldn’t have come after any juvenile like he came after me. This was a week after the cop incident, and I was all ready to settle down and see what became of me in New York. Then the airplane took me out, with this boy staring down at the lights and not holding back a tear when it came.

“You saw the dean at Columbia.”

“Yes, yes, yes. Nothing doing. Columbia is all filled up already with its quota for five years.”

“He liked you, didn’t he?”

“He said he wanted me to go there. If there was any way …”

This Was the old man and me. Something had happened to me. I had seen a little of the world and was able to lie freely. I have no idea what Columbia University looks like to this day. I saw nothing but Coney Island and Greenwich Village. I gave the old man a phony description of Wall Street and Madison Avenue, which he fed on. The Museum of Modern Art for my mother. “It’s just too much to fathom, Mother.” Mother wanted to know about New York generally. “The city didn’t do much for me. It’s just concrete blocks with people trying to live under them and between them.” My mother was delighted. She knew there wasn’t any place more imposing then Memphis. She copied what I said down in this diary that she kept about once every five years; she kept notes on important events of her lifetime in that book.

I always wanted to ask Harley Butte, “Where is your daddy?” “Who is he?” “What does he think of you ?” His mother was black. She lived in town, not too far from Harley’s own house, up a hill full of dandelions and wild clover, in a house with a huge rectangular porch in front; the house had a sunken first story or basement, and the porch was on the second level and had steep wooden steps running up to it. These steps had no rails; they were about a yard wide — just a slight improvement over a ladder. The porch itsdf was a sloping platform on which four decrepit rocking chairs sat; there was a banister running across it, but only about a third of the original support sticks were left. Some of the other sticks were lying on the ground under the porch. This house was a ruined summer home that some white family had lived in seventy-five years ago. A forest of tremendous oaks and beeches used to stand here; Spanish moss and shade hung around it. Just below it was a lake wider than a mile. Now, the bed of that lake held all of niggertown. Driving across the tracks at the mill, you really decline into niggertown. Once I heard about this lake that used to be there, I thought of being underwater when I passed Ann Mick’s house and went on down into the spade community. I’d see colored people down in these brown hills and think about them as fish, dark fish breathing some-thing different from what I did, some thick gas in brown water with the gases of the paper mills boiling on the top of it. Harley’s mother’s house was without paint, and the timbers stood forth in a dark, grainy brown like a limb you’d pull out of an ancient lake. She was the only one there. Harley himself lived in a neat cottage with a white fence on a rise on the other side of niggertown. His mother called herself Mrs. Butte, and must’ve been about sixty-five.