Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

The fans were not hostile, but they weren’t going to cheer for just any noise. I looked down at them — restless cocoa pods of their faces, all of them drinking beer in two feet of space per couple. The waiters couldn’t reach the tables and there was some anger over this fact. We three had on our coats and tennis shoes — the I Vee League demands — but the crowd was much more casual than that. We seemed stiff as dolls. I was frozen up and barely made squeaks on the horn tuning with Silas. Silas’s cello clonked like a banjo, and Joe rapped preparatorily with doubt, like the drums were turning to oatmeal on him.

“We are ready. Sting like a wasp,” said Silas. He was sure of us. Good man, Silas. My throat grew warm and wet Joe began sounding like a drummer suddenly. We were standing by for an advent into “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

“Toot,” said a spade voice. So I went right to it.

We’d never been better. Coming in tight, I hit the flatted seventh of what I meant to hit, way up there, and came back “down in a baroque finesse such as I’d never heard from myself, jabbing, bright, playing the pants off Sweet Georgia, causing them to flutter in the beer and bacon smoke of the place. Silas began the dip-thrums and I unified with him while Joe locked the gates on the measures, back-busting that beautiful storm of hides and cymbals. Harry had found it and he began screaming with glee through the horn, every note the unlocked treasure of his soul — and things he had never had, yes, he hit an F above high C! What a bop the three of us were raising in there, what a debut, what a miracle. My horn pulsed fat and skinny. Oh, Harry was stinging them, but stinging them mellow. Didn’t I see out the corner of an eye that some spades were moving to us, see some eyes blissfully shut, heads pumping, grooving, digging us, seeing Sweet Georgia shriek after her panties? I gave Silas the solo bars, seeking that F again. Joe lowered the storm, and Silas, was he coming forward, was he backing the cello up the wall, did he have some ideas? Yes. The pianist of the Mean Men slunk by me with the devil’s own grin on his face. He wanted in on this, must have it.

As I lay out, I glanced over at the rest of the Mean Men, who were lining the bar, a glass of beer in the right hand of each man. I heard the pianist behind me ease in with Joe and Silas, still looking at the Mean Men. When I saw that even line of Negroes it came to me, a vision of Harley Butte’s band. They marched perfectly, those fifteen-year-old kids molded into impeccable musicians. Harley on the side in his white helmet, the years of band-work behind him displayed in the wafer-colored face of the man. The Beta Camina Gladiators dressed in green, as glorious, prosperous, confident, free, and arrogant as they would ever be, under Harley, keeping to that dream of perfect Sousan music for so long, under Harley, the hater of blues for so long; keeping that flame at Beta Camina, rehearsing those black germs without mercy, for the pure joy of having faultless geometry and faultless music at the same time. I did not want to get sappy about this, did not want to think , aw God, but I felt shoddy, unrehearsed. The applause was a fraud, the spades were drunk. I knew I had been at the peak of what I wanted, I might still be on the peak, but I couldn’t, couldn’t . It was my time to play again, but my horn was stuffed up, it was crammed with green uniforms, and I was smiling . I was not embarrassed.

“You just quit, didn’t you? What did you, why did you lay off when we were hotter than we ever were? You were stinging them. I was getting it on my part. I was soimding like the mother of music, then you fart off!”

“The back of that place was like about to shake off! I was playing real drums like for the first time in my life. The niggers were jumping up and down in that tube thing,” said Joe.

“I tell you what. I tell you it’s a good thing that piano man came up and finished the number or it woulda been total fucked ruin. Those people were kind to us to let us step and play. I made some friends in there.”

“It’s like forty miles over here to Vicksburg.”

Listen, Harry Monroe, I was thinking. Listen to these good men you brought down with you. Why why why in hell did you have to become a thinking person, what kind of baba are you to be thinking right in the middle of the best jazz you’ve ever played?

“Knowing of your big weekend appearance, I was interested to learn from this source”—Fleece was mild and clinical, always drawn in by pain—“that you folded rather mysteriously during the first song in Vicksburg. Believe it or not, I wanted you to make it over there because you wanted it so much. And being honest, I heard you through the door one night and thought you were pretty good. I like that mute-thing you played through in the end of the horn. It had a certain sound I was beginning to like. Fuzzy and sorrowful, in a darting way.”

“The whole night was fuzzy and sorrowful.”

“You say you’ve put up your horn for good?”

“Probably.”

“I wouldn’t do that.” He was perched on his rack like an owl.

“I think I should get back to thinking. On the books. Since I can’t quit thinking. The estate of the world never sleeps.” I repeated something I’d heard. “I got some catching up to do. Tomorrow I’ve got to smoke some graphs for my EDTA and ATP stuff.”

“You ought to keep up the horn, or something else. Because you don’t seriously think you’ll ever see the inside of med school, do you?”

“I’ll bet you one hundred dollars that I do.”

“I’ll give you a hundred dollars. I feel guilty. I know I got you into pre-med. Look. Sometimes I don’t think I’m going to make it. Have you added up the years? I mean lately.”

Well, I did win the bet.

I used to hang around the snooker hall in Dream of Pines, especially during those months when I was practicing trumpet so hard and wanted a couple hours’ breather. By being at the snooker hall I thought I was allaying some of the doubts that the guys had about me being the fabled queer who had molested Lloyd Reese. I played some fairly tough sharks and learned the game by needing to win, having my sexual reputation at stake. To be a queer in Dream of Pines was to be like an alligator wearing panties. I was an athlete in the snooker hall and defeated many a mill hick and rube, who could not really afford to pay for the games they lost.

So you see I was taking Fleece over to the 20th Century in Jackson three times a week and coaching him, giving him thirty points, just wanting a semblance of competition out of him, beating him, making him pay, until he got hooked on the game and had to play me, for money, a beer, for Bet, probably, if I’d pushed it. People of intelligence get hooked on snooker very easily. The pockets are so small they seem impossible. They notice all the red balls and the peculiar configuration of the snooker set; there is an ideal lawn of space — the felt — to their eyes. There is an invitingness in the problem of spheres and motion, there is little dumb luck as in pool. Compared, once you shoot a few games, pool seems a game of fat men hitting bowling balls with ax-handles. Fleece even broke dates with Bet to shoot with me. He bought himself a two-piece cue stick across the street at Hale and Jones. We finished up the evening by eating the red beans and rice plate at Al’s Half Shell—650—which Fleece generally owed me, plus up to four Millers. Tabasco on the rice, an extra sausage, and you had a fine growling meal inside you. These afternoons I played as if I had enemies watching me. These enemies were there back at the school. I could not name them, could not make out their faces, but there was a gallery of them in my mind, and it was swelling. Finally I saw two faces: Dave, the counselor, and Patsy Boone, whose face was in her stomach, with her breasts above it like a twin-peaked jester’s cap, and the scorning beard of light hairs on her chin. Patsy I had dreamed of like this, Dave was so ugly he had to appear, but there were others, swelling.