Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“I’m a dirty boy. Hit me.”

I tapped him. His eyes were still shut.

“Hit me hard, Ruben. You know how fed up with me you are.”

I punched him. He slunk away and crawled back to his bed over the foot-high rubble. He put his hand in the plate I’d brought him from the cafeteria.

“I’m a dirty boy, dirty, dirty, dirty boy. Get me a preacher.”

I closed my book. “All right, I will.”

I went down two floors and got that Baptist from South Carolina that I used to room with. He was already asleep, nine o’clock at night, and came to the door in a brown robe. He couldn’t make me out. I went in the room to help him find his quadrafocals. A Chinese boy was sitting up sleepily on the other bunk. This was Don Thing, the poet from Hong Kong. He wrote a sort of timid new English set to poetry in the dart , the campus literary magazine. His poems were printed on the slant, with lines wide apart, so as to de-emphasize what utter banal coonshit they were.

“Don and I have taught each other a lot,” said Thomas, my old roommate, going up the stairs in his cloth skids. His tiny black eyes were so lost in his glasses, he seemed imprismed, and you thought he probably couldn’t hear you, either.

“I’ve brought Thomas,” I said to Fleece, who lay stiff on the bed, like an open-eyed corpse. He hadn’t eaten in two days and had seldom smoked. I was the one who had to explain to his professor in the lab. I backed to the door and told Thomas Fleece was ready for him. Thomas made his way over the collapsed library and knelt by the bed, being unable to find a seat. I shut the door as if I’d left, easing at the same time into the plaster cave of the closet. Thomas never even looked back.

“Monroe said you needed me.”

“Pastor, when you get as much as I have and you can’t quit getting it, but you know you’re robbing your mind—”

“Is this about a girl?”

“I won’t say her name.”

“Have you made her pregnant?”

“No. I want you to read the letters that led me down this sorry road. Pick up one of them. Look around the room for letters written in brown ink.”

Thomas bent around the room like some huge exiled rat with goggles. He waddled over a cigar box which was tumping out the letters we hadn’t burned. Then he picked up a wad and sat down to read. This took ten minutes. There was only the study lamp on, upended.

“This paper smells like a restroom. Is that the joke, that now I have smelly hands?”

“What he has done, Pastor, I think, is make an intellectual preoccupation out of sex. You see how much good grammar he spends on it. Sex wasn’t made for thought, was it? It’s only instinct and touch. As intellectual matter it is a swamp from which no man comes back whole. You go into the swamp with your mind — there seems to be so much to contemplate. And you come back, if you get back, with a few pubic hairs in your hand and a shriveled-up backbone.”

“Why do you need me here? You aren’t going crazy like Monroe said.”

“Yes I am! I’ve been theorizing on sex every minute since I found out it was possible that a lady might smile when she spread her legs. I get flashes of sexual visions as fast as you can open and close your hand. I read books and see flickering pictures, not a movie, but still-life photographs that … I know that when the mind plays variations on the same theme, you have lost part of it somewhere—”

“Well, you do have a lot of theories for everything you say, don’t you?” says Thomas. “Wait. Now you say you are getting it regular?”

“.. I have had too much in too short a time. My brains are turning to mud. I need to put my foot on some rock, and you may be that rock, Thomas.”

“What are you wanting to tell me?” demanded Thomas. “You’ve got genius and you’re getting it regular and you’re lying in your bed moo-cowing? Why’m I kneeling here? I got a ninety I. Q., I been wandering around in a funnybook for six years being hooked by every sharpie in the pulpit, I got this looking at me in the mirror, I couldn’t find twat if I paid for it, and I’m led down here by a guy that hates my guts to babysit his roommate that can’t live with his own luck, well I’m getting back to sleep and that for your information is the only fun I have!”

Thomas waded out of the room and smashed the door to. Fleece let out a prolonged swoony sort of groan.

“Look who was here!” I said, leaping out of the curtains. Fleece started in fright. Then he tried to settle himself into a sort of corpse stiffness again, his back to me. “I heard, I heard. He would not be your rock, the rock ran, eh?” Fleece would not respond. “I was surprised. Thomas. My God! I can foresee the day when nobody’s a pastor any more. All the rocks’ll be wandering around in a funnybook. Matter of fact, they’ll be pissed-off when a simple soul comes to them with his guilty little diary.” If you know Gleason, with his Reggie Van Gleason the Third voice, I was talking like that, the dandified baron with a cold. But nothing from Fleece. I knew he’d been serious with Thomas, that he had not known I was there. “Why don’t you get your ass up, Fleece?”

There was another whole day of silence yet. I came in at a late hour. Fleece was sitting on his bed. He had brewed himself a cup of instant coffee with hot tap water from the lavatory. He gave me advice.

“You need to have at it with one girl for a length of time, my friend. Buy presents, work her delicately. Hold hands in the movies. Pet. Neck. Begin begging. See her slip her underwear off with tears in her eyes …

“Be under standing yet press on. After some days, hear her beg with another kind of tears in her eyes. She has built her house around you. Meet Daddy, who thinks you’re someone she’s hired to take up her luggage to the dorm and is surprised to find out you are her spark, as Mommy calls you in letters to her daughter. But know the reality (outside, the mob howling that you can’t have this girl); minutes after Daddy and Mommy have driven off back to Rolling Fork, she can’t wait for dark to fall. Drags you across the highway along the path laid out for the cross-country team, by the orange markers on trees and cloths tied on limbs, your shoes hitting all the roots in the wood-path. Down a hill to the pond. Through the blackberry bushes on the dam, seeking the smaller path veering down on the back of the dam, in moonglow. Through the rotten leaves, the snails, the snakes, to a shelf. See and hear the dress fall lightly, see that movement of hands to her back, see the brassiere cast afloat, watch her bend, pull off the wispy hose from her legs, the brilliant white panties torn up off her feet, because she’s lying down now. See the long fingers on your belt buckle. Have that, my friend. Have the zipper zipped down for you. See your watch taken off, feel your pants clink down with the wallet and your belt buckle weighting them. Feel air on your thighs, my friend. Then save your woman, cover her moans, fill her. Be an eel in waves of soup. Try to swim until you evaporate. You were her hero. Then the next morning see her all crisp, combed, new dress, sprayed hair. Glancing by you as if the competition for her had not been settled. Other men might make a play. So she tries to look pretty because they must all hurt knowing she is owned by you.”

Fleece seemed enchanted, telling this. It was so strong that, a couple of nights after it, I went to sleep trying to dream of a loved one. I forced it, I got the dream, but she was a woman at the bottom of a swimming pool. She wore hose, nothing else, and she was giving a lecture on sex. With a pointer she rapped on her sex and pushed it out a bit. You could barely see, because she had hair like a sheepdog, but you could see, as through the eye of a needle, two cooked hamburgers rammed together. Your eyes went up in horror to see her chest, where there were two suit-buttons sewed on her, bleeding. Her lips were moving in a cold lecture all the time.