Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“Now let’s get this straight. You do allow private nookie in the rooms. And we could practice music without fear of complaint,” said Silas to Mother Rooney.

“Music? Of course! I love music. I had hoped someone would room here who could play—”

“Never mind going on and on about it. Listen, I don’t want you even close to the south tower, don’t be dragging around when we’re over there. Leave this door open. We’re moving in.”

“Silas, God knows!” I implored.

“Now this is Sunday morning,” he continued. “We’re going to be sleeping all day, probably. Don’t wake us up making the sign of the cross or knocking your beads around and don’t slam the door leaving for Mass. You be a good girl and tonight Monroe here might take you down to the Royal for a movie and kiss your neck.”

“Lookahere,” I said. Mother Rooney was seventy.

“The movies ? I love the movies,” she said, gazing at me fondly, which made me think she only heard certain hard nouns you said to her, especially the ones she wanted to hear and cherished.

“Let’s move in, men. Mother Rooney, you grab Fleece’s trunk. Watch the old arthritis. It weighs a ton.” I grabbed the trunk up quickly myself. The thin old lady was actually moving toward it.

On the way over to the tower, Silas, with his arms full of clothes, turned back to us.

“She loves me.”

“What is this place?” said Fleece.

“You just keep a smile on your face and. peer into her eyes with concern. She puts her hand on your shoulder. Let her do that. She loves that most of all.”

Silas went straight to bed. Fleece began yammering.

“What are we doing here? What is this place? We’re in the inside of a three-story tube. He forced us over here. We came over yanked along like damn puppets. He’s smooth. He’s mean. You heard him talking to that old woman. We have to pay extra money. How’s your old man gonna like that? You have to write a letter home just like me. But not that rich bastard up there!” Silas was in the top room, me in the middle, Fleece below. The rooms were perfectly round, and there was a light and double bed in each of them. I asked Fleece why didn’t he go down and enjoy his big bed like I was fixing to do. He went down the unpainted wood planks which were his stairway. The stairway to Silas’s room was planted in the north corner of my room. It was a narrow thing, had a wrought-iron banister, and hugged the wall.

But, say, if Fleece wanted to visit Silas — an unlikely wish — he would come up his stairs, walk to the right three feet, in full view of me if I happened to be in, to get the stairs to Silas’s room. I could see Silas descend, similarly, and go to his right to catch the stairs to Fleece’s room, which had a back door giving onto more black iron stairs that put you in the back yard. This is the route, these iron steps, we all used coming to and going away from our quarters.

The stairs coming through my room, I was fixed worse than anybody. I awoke on my bed and had to observe Silas escort his drunk hags up to his room. They were always little women, and I saw in the moonlight that they weren’t even as good as the roaches I’d been with. I think they must’ve been nurses and beauticians. We were near the nursing school and the beauty college. It was well known that the girls from these institutions would tear off their pants for anybody who gave off a hint of making ten thousand dollars a year. Silas’s bed walked all over his room. I thought of the tiny little mermaid he’d taken up there. Almost always, you would hear the girl weeping; hear her bare feet sliding. The ceiling was thin and the stairway was completely open. Silas would speak out, broad and jolly. What he liked best, I gathered, was for little girls to break into tears when he undressed. He would call them to sit on his lap, they would do this — I guess — and he would lecture them about how he would never force himself on them — I heard one of these talks — because he didn’t want to soil their plans to marry a smaller fellow with high principles. She must understand that she was only a naked pygmy on his lap, and that the kisses he was giving her were only for good luck.

Then they would come down fully dressed, Silas handling her with one wrist.

Silas read certain magazines and sent away for certain uncensored underwear and a bottle of red oil. He called me up to his room and explained this. The room was so bright you felt heat. He had two sunlamps on; the curtains were tied back so anybody on Titpea could see him. He wore this bikini which amounted to two strips of leather attached to a bandage covering his genitals; the idea was a sling made into a jockstrap. He talked, at ease, sitting on his bed, as if he had on nothing unusual.

“This is me. I can’t change it. It hurts me to put on a shirt It hurts my arms. It hurts me to wear pants, it binds me. And oh God, shoes. Nothing fits me. When I put on socks, it’s like, my feet, somebody’s twisting a tourniquet on them.”

“Fleece got in trouble wearing his underwear in his garage,” I said. I asked him if I ought to call Fleece up to talk it over with him. Yes, yes, Silas wanted to hear what Fleece had to say. I yelled down. Fleece wasn’t there. I’d told him he could use my car, and he was out with it now.

“I have to wear tennis shoes,” Silas was explaining, “and they’re bad enough, but if I wore leather shoes, they would strangle me. They’d kill me.”

It was nice to be in the double bed all to myself, nobody else in the room. I read several books in this bed that I would never have read in the dorm: Billy Budd, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, The Sun Also Rises , and The Great Gatsby , all of them pleasures which inflated me and upon which, on the exams, I could write for hours. I was taking a minor in English and was making A, no sweat, in the courses where these books were assigned.

One morning Fleece was coming up and Silas was going down. I was too sleepy to get what they said to each other. But I know the word-knives flew and the low blows of the tongue were traded.

When I was fully awake, Fleece was pulling out the drawers of my chest. He was looking for the gun he’d given to me. He said, One night when Silas was asleep, he would go up and shoot him through the head. I told him that would be cowardly. He said, No, it would be beautiful. He would come down and turn the gun over to me. I would make a citizen’s arrest on him. I didn’t know then that Bet had agreed to go out with Silas that night, on the terms that he would quit calling her.

Next day it was bright gray in the room. The windows were small octagonal portholes, and you had to turn on the bare overhead light to see anything. I hadn’t smoked for three days. When I woke up, I was ready to meet the classes I’d missed and attack them with the facts I’d memorized. One look at my twelve pages of histology and I knew it cold. I felt so healthy I could learn anything. I could swallow the world.

But then they showed me love, the love from afar that hurts the worst. Silas and I went to “Oklahoma!” and sat beside Fleece and Bet, who were holding hands. We all knew that Whitfield Peter’s niece was in the musical. I bought a coat for the occasion, a wild red madras plaid. I looked around for Peter in the audience. He didn’t seem to be there. I carried the little automatic in my coat pocket.

The student orchestra took the overture surprisingly well. I could’ve done better on the first trumpet part, but you can’t go through life adding up regrets like that. My old friend Livace was conducting, and Zak, the drama teacher, had coached the cast. Livace was waving the baton with big romance, his black tuxedoed back to us, and you saw he was conducting nobody but himself, saw he had forgotten the orchestra and was dwelling on his own histrionics. I thought of shooting him in the back to get him in line. Because he was what was wrong with the musical. He was not one to follow the singers on stage. They followed him , they sang to him . The singers kept their eyes glued to his baton.