Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

We were all crazy about beauty and power. Some of us fell in love with our own voices and joined the glee club or the forensic club, and some the band, some football; some went in for automobiles; some for clothes, driving to Shreveport and Dallas to buy them; some of us just lent money and looked at the beautiful girls; the guys went around adoring their own erections and body hair; the girls, their expanding breasts — everybody having at it with his aboriginal ego, for beauty and power. Even those mill boys in my home room who were in bad health and held startling contests at breaking wind while devotional was being read by a member of the Bible Club over the P.A. system — they were having at it in their way: Beauty and Power.

The room fans on second level brought in the smell of that oily peanut butter off Monday’s sandwiches, or that heated tunafish odor from salads the cafeteria maids were scooping. It was Federal Aid lunch, and cost a quarter.

We had one teacher Harvard-trained by way of postal correspondence and another who had half a master’s degree. And there were twenty others actively, passively, strangely, cryptically, feverishly incoherent, each in his special style.

I had the head football coach for biology. Here was a fellow whose ambition it was to impress us with the night-mare of a soldier burning alive in a shell-struck tank — something he’d witnessed in World War II — and also with the unknown but true prevalence of tapeworm among the kids of the South. He could make you uncomfortable with his rugged poetry on these subjects, but he seemed to have nothing else to say. It was known that he also felt deeply about masturbation, but he didn’t care to broach this in mixed classes. At three o’clock he ran off to coach the varsity in his Marine Corps shorts. He was positive the trouble with his team was either tapeworm or masturbation, and out there he made himself vocal about it, yelling out at this boy or other that he must be sleeping with his hands under the covers, or needed a physical examination. This always got a big laugh from the line coach, a flaccid baboon who taught factory arts and made a point out of being hilariously obsequious to the head coach. He wore sleeveless jerseys and had marvelously huge, sopping armpits.

My sophomore year I went out for football, but caught a cold and quit. I was just about good enough at it to make first team out at Dream of Pines Colored, which by then must’ve been featuring tuberculosis victims on its varsity. I heard their band when I was out on the field, though. They were about half a mile away and still sounded like a heavenly orchestra to my ears. It seemed silly to be out there at practice in my clouted, filthy pads when I heard them.

I was the sort that tended to bear grudges. I didn’t like anybody correcting me on anything for any reason. I was down and out. I was not proud. The old pubic pox was still scattered on my face, and yet I yearned for everything beautiful in life. I was ready to be abused and picked on. I got into a fight in the locker room at the gym over a yachtsman’s cap the old man had brought back to me as a souvenir from Miami when he went to a convention of mattress people there. And I won that fight, against a fat kid one grade under me, using depraved tactics like sitting on his chest and hitting him in the face, and using, really, everything I had in me. I admit I hit him as often as I could with the knuckle wearing the Trojan-head ring — a gift from Mother.

The spinster librarian got on me one day for not smiling in the hall. She said she knew my folks would be disappointed in the hard personality I was showing. Then I broke down — not to her, not in front of that bitch, but in my mind: Aw sweet Jesus, don’t you know when you’re as ugly as a shotgunned butt of pork, and you love everything and hate everything at the same time, when you haven’t got a face decent enough to look at the girls you want to look at, and when you haven’t got a talent to show, being neither introvert nor extrovert, because you don’t have the talent to go either way, and you start loving the rain because you might be seen with more shadow on you than usual, and hating the sun because it exposes all the corners you want to creep into, and you avoid mirrors and beautiful objects, like your old glass agate marbles, the rock garden in the country club foyer, and the color photographs in National Geographic , because you’re afraid of these beautiful things looking back and folding up into cinders from your ugly stare — don’t you know, Librarian, that you can’t go around giving everybody a smile like your ass was made of candy? Much less you, with that ecclesiastical look of sour meno-pause on your spinster face, would I smile at, Miss Dedder. You stand there telling me about my smile. And you Miss Dedder, owed some poor man your sex sometime back in the thirties, and ignored him; you might could’ve made some poor man sane with it, way back then in Louisiana, with Huey Long and his crowd rearing up, but you didn’t, did you? And you telling me about my lack of smile. You sit behind that desk six hours a day surveilling around the tables to make sure none of us write filthy slurs against the status quo in the margins of your precious books, or that the rednecks aren’t tearing the brassiere advertisements out of the magazines. I looked away from her and went my way down the hall.

In chemistry we were led by a chubby, angelic mamma who asked the class what atomic piles were. We were discussing isotopes or rather being lectured to about them by a guest from the waterways experiment station. Our teacher was embarrassed that none of us knew what atomic piles were. I finally yelled out that I guess they were the worst disease imaginable, and there was fragmentary laughter around the class. Such was my early wit.

In the same class, sitting directly behind me, was a freckled bottle blonde who would go it to the extent of a finger. I wasn’t in her clique, but I liked talking to her. She’d read the novel Peyton Place several times and told me it was the best novel, going away, for all time. She would knock her-self out in class by taking ten deep breaths and then blowing on her thumb. She actually fainted back in her seat, with a smile, for a minute or so. Her name was Winona. She spoke with some authority, implying that she knew quite a bit for her age — and I knew positively of a few colleagues who’d couped her digitally. She was always telling me what I needed. You need a beer, she’d say. I liked to be mothered that way.

At Dream of Pines High we had teachers quitting all the time for reasons of pregnancy, higher pay in the insurance field, or personal despair.

In the eleventh grade I drank my first beer, and my facial condition evaporated. I looked in the mirror and couldn’t believe what a finished piece of young manhood I was. This one old fossil teacher in history was always yelling about how time flew and how hateful it was. But I loved time, for getting me older and good-looking. I still had a few scratches around the cheekbones from the disappeared pox, but it would take a really finicky critic to say I wasn’t handsome — though maybe a little guarded and un-holy-seeming, like a sheik. I’m told I looked like an Indian long-distance runner. I was five foot ten and yearning toward six feet. My grip on the veneered scroll on the top of the stair rail felt good to me. I could bend a beer can into a crimped wad with my right hand. I still have this Asian cut of face which no one in my family can account for. The Monroes were French-Irishmen with memories of the Middle Ages, according to the lineage-tracing my old man once did with a bonus research offering from whatever encyclopedia we have in the house.

In English lit I ran into a teacher that was deep. Her eyes twinkled with arty secrets, and it didn’t hurt anything that she was lovely of face and had the figure of a schoolgirl. She read poems with a nice, calm movement of mouth. I don’t know why she was at Dream of Pines, which was known as a tough school. She was the only good teacher there. I can still feel the dull, light rhythms way in the back of my head from the poems we read in her class. We had Sir Thomas Wyatt, who composed a poem about his old girlfriends and the girl who said “Dear heart, how like you this?” as she put her arms long and small around him, and I can’t forget old cobwebby Sir Thomas and those girls stalking with naked feet in his chamber. We had “The Love-song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with timid Alfred who wouldn’t even eat a peach, but was fond of women’s forearm hair as seen by lamplight The peach and the arm hair related to each other, the teacher told us. I asked this brilliant fellow with crewcut and bifocals how that was, and he sent me an unfriendly note, not wanting to talk in class: “The peach and the arm are both fuzzy and fleshy. Don’t ask me any more questions.” I was pleased to find that out, and later I showed up that bifocals prick by handing in a poem of my own composition which the teacher raved about. She read it in class. It was about a deep-sea diver talking to the ocean and had a line