Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“I said, Ruben, that I appeared in the garage in nothing but my jock shorts, and that the women called and told my mother.” He put his eye up to the hole closer. “But there were mitigating circumstances. I had been reading Walt Whitman. ‘Song of Myself,’ you know, the poet, Ruben?” I was weary of the Ruben theme.

“I know about Walt Whitman,” I said, lying.

“Lookie here.” He crooked his index finger through the screen hole, its end searching stupidly.

“What?”

“Man-root,” he said in that crimp-nosed redneck way.

“Oh Lord. This is diseased,” I said. “This is sick, an ob-session!”

“Yes!” Fleece brayed, doing the finger lungingly, mashing out the hole.

“What would your mother say?” I was really wondering. It was the wrong thing.

“She would say, ‘ Aaaaaaaaa! ’” He jumped up on the screen, shrieking, and he and the whole affair fell on me. He hit me through the screen on my face and back, me trying to squirm out. “Nasty boy! Ugly, ugly!” he said, hitting me. “Out in the garage, after all those years in God’s house!” I smelled the lab alcohol on his breath then, through the screen. I took account of this, and really it was a wide relief that he might be mostly drunk. “Monroe!” he hit me on top of the head a last time as I was turning him and the screen back. “Life is long, and so messy. I had to grow up, didn’t I? I get a chance to be messy too, don’t I?” I had knocked him over by then. He scrambled to the door. “I love it, I love life!”

Fleeing, he begged me, “Please don’t tell them. Don’t tell them.” Then he wavered swiftly down the dorm stairs. Who could chase that?

Fleece was sharp of bone. His back almost cut through his shirt. He was my height, five ten, but weighed somewhere near 120. At twenty-one, the boy was losing his hair. He was left with the high, bald intimidating forehead of, well, of a genius. Already he was reading the Merck Manual as if there were patients calling him. Fleece was never bored by pain, his own or that of others. I presumed he’d make a good physician, but there was this cornered spider-monkey style of his that might give him some trouble at bedside. Also, he was prone to an attack of what he called Hudson Bay flu about once a month. Mucus would harden like antlers in his head and chest and he couldn’t get out of bed. He’d just lie down, smoking one Salem after another.

It was then that I would hum softly and earnestly one of the old hymns of the church, and another. I would become an endless seepage of fine old hymnal numbers. Fleece would turn his head on the pillow and look at me with his red flu-strickeneyes. “It takes a sorry white man to treat a sick genius like this. You bastard. Go on off and suck your trumpet, you bastard.” Then he’d cough like somebody raking out an iron tomb. I hummed on, sweetly smiling.

A day in December when I was at it again, he whispered to me why didn’t I smoke some of his marijuana, or drink some of his lab alcohol? Everything that was in the room that was his, was mine, he croaked. Why didn’t I read some of his terrible books? I could even read the letters. On his desk he had Justine, Fanny Hill, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer , and The Blind Mistress . But I went straight for the letters. He had been clutching them significantly now for a couple of months, and sort of patrolling the room with his eyes as he clutched them.

I took them out one by one from the three cigar boxes, sitting on my bed, reading right down to “love-milk” (the writer was strong on using quotation marks around anything he considered reckless), “the curlyfur purse of love’s jam,” and “the tongue that laps the yolk of your precious egg.” “Remember (said the writer) when we played early morning breakfast and you said, how sad we don’t have any cream along with those lovely eggs of yours under Sir Silly Limpness who was, shame on you, such a Bully Be-Hard last night. We could have eggs poached in cream, but I know you are too tired to go to the store for it now, and since necessity is the mother of invention, I’ll just… then Beloved you tittered and threw your head down full of your glorious hair — there is just no expression for your full lank hair lying in a thousand soft pricklings on my stomach, Oh how many gentlemen have felt that ever? And breakfasted upon it with your lips, then your whole drawing oralness, making your soft direct assault against the object you had been shy of before, with precious tears streaming down your cheeks, the meal so full, and so surprised was I, I spewed irregardless of your sacred throat or former earthly laws of love-conduct, Beloved. You sat up and laughed the laugh of wiser freedom that good God had given us. (me dropping this page, opening another envelope, finding) … the magic grape-heaven of your nipples, darling rare nipples and puckered buttons, the only things I know of that God has put on this earth that swell, widen and grow daily the more one puts his mouth to them and sups thereof. Was I too greedy the last opening of your bosoms? Splendrous sight! greedy at the brown buttons covering half your ideal breasts. Yet still you pushed them up with your hands — ah memory, memory of your fingernails painted heart-glow red which you always kept polished along with your toe-nails whatever hour I awoke and declared the timeless want of man for woman — true Beloved, you demanded of me I give you that hour’s ‘sucking’ time that I never not one day since I knew it was your sacred desire deprived you.”

(Me, lifting out another, reading into further sacredness, heartness, Belovedness) “… can you Beloved like I can away from you, can you have that holy liquid ‘Coming’ when you think of me, as I can as I imagine you postured upon the violet sheets of our marriage bed, what did we care if every window, every door of the house were wide open, having the north breeze wind upon your my Beloved’s soft thin legs, your eyes, elfin eyes, hoping unselfishly that this might be one of the times when you ‘pulsate’ too? Can you think yourself into love’s undeniable ‘release’? As your husband can do now? Last letter you said it was impossible. Beloved, you must believe in the psychic power channel between us. You must concentrate on me and find me in our most wanton duets of yesteryear. Picture your ecstatic flanks rubbing me, your little feet interlocking and kneading the base of my spine, that sitting position we assumed when we could spy more completely on one another’s mounting course of pleasure; picture me mounted, eyes greedy and agleam … I know so many of your thoughts must of needs be dismal by the mere existing day by day, but you must think through these weak chains of boredom to me, think through ‘impossible’—that’s a word a nigger would use. Beloved, don’t use it again. Let yourself into the deluxurious habitats of our psychic channel, and ‘COME, Come Please.’”

(Next letter.) “I have not been getting your letters. I have discovered that two of the doctors are Jew rascals. I cannot doubt they have made something happen to them. I couldn’t tell you what I have suffered at the hands of the niggers. If I thought one of their hands had ever touched an epistle of yours, or that one of those Iscariots had breathed on your precious script….”

(I keep opening.) “‘Doctor’ Eis thinks he has healed me. He asks me if I am keeping my hands off myself now. I said to him, unspokenly, keep your hands off me you unincinerated curd of Jezebel’s milk. Why don’t I hear from you? Send your letters Special Delivery, Darling.”

(Spotting the next one, losing desire.) “Can one look anywhere without seeing crowds of nigger orderlies? They creep through these halls as if they were in a haunted house. They peek in to see poor white men flat on their backs. Their eyes are like muddy eggs. They laugh. They are such things in their white uniforms; they cherish cleaning up the vomit of men who would thrash them if the odds were even…. I can not tell you (Oh, Beloved, now I don’t know for certain that you even hear my epistolary voice!) how I have suffered by these prissy niggers this Eternity, from the first day a year ago when one of them tied me to the bed with raw hemp rope, and told me to be ashamed of myself. But now that they know I’m getting out, they don’t come near me.”