Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“Are you a genius?” Fleece asked me.

“No. I’ve never considered being a gen—”

“Just going to clog up the field of music, are you? I understand, I guess. I’d hoped we’d have some ideas transpiring around the room. I am a genius. I’m going to bring something forth , my brains are going to come up with something ”. He caught me staring at him. “All right, rube, stare at me. I’ve got skinny limbs, I’m not Mister Muscle. Want to see me look like a puppet?” He stood up and formed himself into a slump which made him look exactly like a pale marionette out of work and hanging. Even sitting back down to his chair, he seemed to be worked from above by some cynical puppeteer. “Did you notice that fulgurant mother of a forehead I’ve got, though?” He tapped it. Then he put his little finger in one ear and hooked it up-wards lovingly: “ Brains up there,” he said.

“I’ve got ideas. I don’t mean I don’t have any ideas,” I defended myself. “There is a lot of idea in music, you know. When I play the trumpet, for example—”

“No, I’m afraid that music is not idea. Music is instinct dignified by instruments or voice. Music is howling in tune. The guts come first, and there is no disinterestedness, as in actual Idea.”

“What would that be like?”

“ Idea ? An idea is something which exists already and does not care a shit whether you like it or not. You probably haven’t had any ideas, rube, not fonking away on a horn. Sorry. I have ideas, I live at the top of my brain. You look like somebody who’s looking out his navel. Oh ho! You want to get me don’t you, Ruben? You want a fistfight! You peer meanly at me! Oh yes, attack! Thinking I look like a limp dry pea-pod or the like, aren’t you? Some sort of fragile herb with hair on its arms. Go ahead, have a blast at me. Everybody else has. Easy stuff! Just one thing: I am a meatball at heart, a red meatball.”

“I wanted to get along,” I said.

“No matter how much you pound me, you can never defeat that meatball inside me. My manhood is sewed up inside me, courtesy of the Baptist Church. My mother cracked me over the head with the Baptist Hymnal. But my head grew , see. I won the State Science Fair … I surged, hating God and His house, which meant, you know, that I was insane . (Did you notice, rube, I said hating , not disbelieving ? I never took the easy way out.) I let a few swearwords drop around the house. I was noticed to be standing in our open garage in only jock shorts by some women driving in from the grocery store who saw fit to call my mother about it; women astonished at how raw I had looked. If I’d had muscles and a tan, they wouldn’t have said anything. But not so with noodle man and all his thigh hair crawling out. Someone must be told. It’s so easy to call a frail man crazy. But you already know all about me, don’t you? Sent in here to practice psychology on me … you would’ve hit me by now if you weren’t hired to counsel me.”

“I don’t know a thing.” I didn’t know that the voice-major in hymnology had asked him to leave after a month of life with him. Fleece’s conscience did not hurt because of any of his crimes, such as threatening to alter the hymnolo-gist fellow’s voice pitch by an operation deft and silent while he slept (Fleece with his early knowledge of medical arts could do it, as the sleepless cantor knew), or ripping out a page of his expensive soft-leather Baptist Hymnal several times for use as he passed by his desk on the way to the commodes. What Fleece was concerned about was that his mother was close on his heels, consulting with men who had the power of throwing him in an asylum. He was always seeing her car around the dorm. Her car was green and black, and every time we neared a car with those colors, no matter what the make, on the way to the cafeteria or classes, Fleece hid behind me. He trembled, jumped up and down on his cigarette, and grabbed the collar of his shirt and buttoned the top button. He’d had bad bronchitis all his life and thought she’d catch him and have him shipped away on, say, three counts of inability to take care of himself. On the positive side, Fleece was sure he could forget all this once he’d “stolen pleasure” with a girl. In the meantime, his imagination was about to do him in.

“My mother can drive to this campus in five minutes if she wants to,” he said; his head rolled like a melon on a stick over his desk. “If you were wondering about my father, my biological father was killed on Tarawa. I have a stepfather who’s high horse in the National Guard; that’s his job, being Field General Creech standing by for flood, tornado, race riot, or direct attack from North Korea. The emergencies for this man are always doubtful in coming, but immense if they do. He and my mother love God but don’t really believe in miracles. Me, I hate God but believe in miracles, very much.

“Sixteen years old, I saw my box garden of cacti bloom out with quills overnight. I was awed by what these plants could do in nothing but sand and quite ready to believe in dew-fairies or the Sand Man or any kind of heavenly intercession that could’ve made this possible, then in comes my mother, who scraws , ‘Now doesn’t that prove that God was here in this room? Oh, Bobby Dove, your little sand garden is a small Holy Land in Mississippi!’ She picks me up by the handle of my spine and rubs my face in the sand around the cacti, as much. Creech is near; he hears her. Thirty minutes later, I’m still in bed, thinking of miracles, reading a paperback Lady Chatterley’s Lover . Creech comes in, in uniform. He eases the book out of my hand and reads the pages I was reading. He keeps the book folded out like I had it, turns it over, and lays it pages down over my five cactus plants in the sand garden. He says, ‘I know you smoke even though she might not.’ I admit it ‘Where are your matches?’ I give him the box in my dresser. He doesn’t ask for the cigarettes. ‘What the Lord giveth, He taketh away,’ enounces Creech, striking the match and setting fire to the book. That’s the only scripture I ever heard from him. The book takes fire, like a burning roof over the cactus plants. They throb away eventually, little crumbling hairy little bulbs. The book collapses among the brown stumps, the blackened sand … the ashes puff up a little, as if Connie and the gamekeeper might still be humping away under them; pussy, with interludes of cigarette-smoking and studying of history and biology — that’s what I dream of. To steal pleasure like that, have it in spite of them that want to coop you up for good. Oh, after the fire I began hissing and they let me crawl off with a book and play with my doo-doo in the corner. That’s what they thought of me reading doubtful Christians like Joyce Cary, Aldous Huxley, and William Faulkner. You couldn’t get Henry Miller in Mississippi then, with which one masturbates feeling like an intellectual snob.

“I dream of my mother escorting me to an amphitheater crowded with castrated singers. Around my neck hangs a white tablet with my negligence and sin shown in black checkmarks. The crowd sings at me in wrath. My mother cries over me. ‘Mercy!’ she wails. She prevails, and we walk down to the bottom of the amphitheater, where there is a cave of exposed muscle tissue between two great male paps. This is God, His Bosom, just set there gigantesque. A wound, harsh, deep, and puckered. My mother and the crowd begin a humming of one of the church hymns they use for Invitationals, meaning that I should go on down into the wound and walk into the raw flesh of the Supreme Being. “But Mother, this hymn I despise is echoing in the wound-hole. This hymn , Mother, I heard it so much at the church, it got into my ears like an infection. I can’t go. I’ve had God speaking through those hymns so much, I’ve been immunized against him. God God, God, you always said to me at home. Is he simply this gruesome slit ? You were so sure of Him, the hymns were so sure of Him. Look at the ‘no-smoking’ sign at the peak of the wound. Just like you said. And the bouncing ball over the words of ‘Amazing Grace’. You know I won’t sing the hymns.”