by Barry Hannah
I leaned and watched the lobby for New York Slim to walk in, lost in Kosciusko, Miss., and looking for me. I would look at my watch and curse fate, giving her just a few more minutes. Then I would curse her and tell her I was through. Natalie Wood, or more probably her cousin from the South, Lee Wood, would come instead. I had seen West Side Story that year, and Natalie was slowly replacing New York Slim. When New York Slim did finally get here, there would be hard words, tears, and it would be tough to tell her she had lost everything—the brick house on the seashore, the sighing room, my drollness, everything—and that I was giving it all over to one of the Miss Woods. There was nothing I could do about it I’d say, it was an affaire de coeur, sorry. The fact is I was going mildly insane. I peered harder into the lobby. All you saw was a solitary whiskered gruff man, probably retired, not even reading a magazine, but looking straight ahead in a sort of shocked anger that put some fear into you. He was not the denizen of an interesting passionate play by T. Williams, as you might hope, but a horrified sufferer of age bound to a colorless tunnel, as if his stare were tied in a knot at the end of it. His face was spotted red, from waiting, I thought. Someday he would just disappear into the wallpaper, which also had red spots in it. Though he’d been without applicants for a long time, in my mind I made him into a smoldering corrupter of the young. We never said a word to him.
In my own town a man named Harold, old enough to be a teacher, was attending the college. Harold, who lived in an attic apartment, was balding and already a man with a heavy if not lengthy past. He had been drafted during the Korean War but had not gone over there with the army until the truce was signed, so that his adventures in the East, for which he had made a lurid album he showed me, were all done in peacetime. The photographs showed a bunch of men in fatigues hanging around in squads, the usual thing, but then there was a whole woman section too. Harold was still in love with these Asian women—I believe they were Japanese—from around where he was stationed. But I had never met a man in love this way, this very meticulous strange way. One of the women had her legs open, and Harold had pasted a straw flat on the photograph running off the picture to the margin and a small photo of his own face. The straw went from her private parts into his very mouth. He had written More, More, More! in the margin. I had seen a few pictures of naked women, but this one drew me back again and again, especially when Harold was out of the room, because I had never seen a woman so seriously and happily showing herself. A dark riot of nerves came over me when I saw her face, so agreeable to the camera. Harold was a very thin man with white hairy forearms, just weak sticks, and narrow in the chest, also hairy above his shirt opening. It must have been a time when American GIs were overwhelmingly popular over there. Harold did not seem like a man who could support this weird Asiatic “love,” yet there were other women—none of them whores, he pointed out—who had loved him, and were also photographed coiled around Harold. Some were full naked or not, and some were playing with each other, happy. Their eyes were all for Harold, who gleamed brightly into the camera, younger and more prosperous than now, a bitter student on the GI Bill.
Harold was a smoker of those short cork-tipped but unfiltered Kools. He wore black high-top sneakers, decades before they were necessary, with irony, for artistics everywhere. The startling denominator in Harold was that he was capable of great passions high and low. I saw him stare at the woman on the street below his place, an abandoned woman I found out later, who walked the bricks smoking a long cigarette in a holder. I’ve never seen so much smoke come out of a person. She would walk slowly along in the regular fog of a ghostly cinema, staring ruefully at the brick streets. She was the daughter of a town scion, a remarkable chemistry prof who was also the mayor, and lived with him on the other side of the block. But her lot was lonesome and bereft. She was one of those women who’d had a single lifetime catastrophe and never recovered, beautiful for the tragedies of T. Williams but now almost unheard of, when everybody joins something and gets well.
“She needs me,” Harold spoke, watching her with deep concern. “That woman needs my love, and here I am selfishly withholding it from her.” But Harold, I thought, she’s the mother of one of my classmates—she’s very, very old. Harold went on condemning himself for not stepping out to the curb and offering his “love” to her. Her son, my elder contemporary, was a person of almost toxic brilliance, scowling and reviling any collection of people in every room I ever saw him in. Another friend later explained that the woman died of a heart attack in that same house, with her son, then an MD, attending. Or rather, more just technically witnessing, as my friend had it, using chilly terms like infarction and fibrillate. Then she was gone—bam, he had said, as he struck his palm with a fist. I saw the wide and high Victorian house as a place of almost epic coldness, a hint of sulphur in the rooms. Harold stayed at the sill, hanging in the window between thought and act, the shadow on a film always in my head, like a ghost on a negative.
Harold found most learning at the college “morbid” and would declaim hotly how desperately much he did not want to know zoology, Old Testament and history. But he was here exploring the “possibles and necessaries,” vaguely of the arts, “doomed to Southern history.” “Oh God, yes I must read it, the obituaries of everybody I despise.” He had a personal contempt for anybody who had ever made a public dent in anything. Fame and battles bored him—all species of dementia. Harold despised so much, you felt very lucky for his friendship. What he liked best were small, troubled people. His passion for the Asian women seemed conditional, almost, on the enormous trouble they had known. Harold attended every play, concert, reading, art opening, and recital at the college and in the adjoining capital city, and found almost everything “unbearably poignant.” He was all for the arts, the more obscure the better. His friends, besides me and two other pals with their “maturity of vision,” he’d call it, were all girls of forlorn mark. Too fat, too nervous, too skinny, too scattered for talk in this world’s language. These he would play bridge with in the college grill. If your back was to them and you didn’t know, you’d have thought they were all girls. Harold loved low gossip and considered scandal the only evidence of true existence on this morbid plain. His voice would go girlish too, more girlish sometimes than that frequent effeminacy you heard from mama-and maid-raised boys. The college was a harbor for great sissies. You’d turn around and see all the hair on his pale, skinny arms and think, well golly, that’s Harold, old veteran Harold. The full Harold to me, though, would be him looking down at that abandoned wife, on the old brick street, afternoon after afternoon, hating himself for all his “wretched hesitations,” saying she needed him, and that he was a cad not to “venture unto her, take her hand.” Wretched hesitation, Harold said, is what embalms our lives, and that was what age demanded of you more and more, to get less and less life. But he was passionately involved in all the troubles of the odd girls he escorted to the grill, and they had a clique around him. It never occurred to me that Harold was sleeping with them, but an older guy much later told me that most assuredly he was. I could think of Harold then, a teacher of history, with another album of his women, and I could see these troubled girls, naked and happy—Harold’s harem, holding out against this “morbid waterless plain,” as he called the environs.
A few scandals at the college made Harold beam and emerge from his habitual state, which was, I think I can say, a kind of expectant gloom. A luster came on him when it was clear the speech and drama teacher—who had kept one of his male protégés, a prominent sissy, in lust bondage—had gone down to scandal, and packed up, leaving in the night. Harold’s pale hairy arms flailed out and back, delighted, up to the neck in it. “Oh, the truth and beauty of a wrecked life, nothing touches it!” he went, imagining the moment-by-moment excruciations of the discovered pederast. The drama master, driving lonely and flushed in his car back to North Carolina. Then there was the milder, but somehow more “evocative” disclosure regarding the tall Ichabodish French teacher, a
curiously removed (how! they learned) man, who drove a giant old blue Cadillac that seemed even larger than Detroit intended. This timid man oozed about in something between a hearse and a cigarette boat. His exposure came about when his landlord opened his rooms one holiday. Everywhere in the room were Kleenexes and castaway plastic bags from the cleaners. He would touch nothing in the room without a Kleenex. He had his socks and underwear dry-cleaned, and wore them straight from the bags. Unused clothes were stacked in their bags in the corner. Kleenex was all over the bedsheets. He could not touch the telephone, doorknob, faucet, or even his own toothbrush without them. Kleenex boxes towered in all nooks and closets. In his diary, there was a last sobbing entry: “Night and day, I detect moisture around my body. Must act.” He was, this French prof, comprehensively germophobic, and the strange order of his disorder howled from the room. Probably this was not even a scandal, but in this small Baptist town with the landlord so loud about it, the professor too was reduced, and soon prowled away in shame. Harold relished this. The perfection of it almost silenced him, a silly eye-shut dream on his face. “The perfection, the perfection, of this.” Every worthy life would have a scandal, Harold said. There was a central public catastrophe in the life of every person of value. The dead sheep, the masses, who lived fearful of scandal (though feeding off it in nasty little ecstasies) were their own death verdict. “Prepare, prepare, little man, for your own explosion,” he told me sincerely. “I am trying to be worth a scandal myself.” Oscar Wilde enchanted him, and Fatty Arbuckle, but not Mae West, who had worn scandal like a gown and made a teasing whole career of it.
I once was sent over to the college by my English teacher to pick up a tape recorder, and was making as long a trip out of it as I could, when I passed a class and saw Harold in the back row, looking down at his desk in silent rage, not as if baffled but as if understanding too much, and personally offended. But this was less noticeable than what he wore. I had simply caught him out of his house in the act of being Harold, gritting his teeth, twirling his pencil, hissing. He had on an old-fashioned ribbed undershirt, some floppy gray-green pants, and some sort of executive shoes, I think banker’s wingtips, with white tube workman’s socks. His hair curled out everywhere from his pale skin. At this college they were stern on dress code. But they left Harold alone, I saw. He did look piercing and untouchable, his Korean near-veteranship a class of its own. They did love the Christian soldier, which he was not, but he had absolute freedom nonetheless as a lance corporal of Section 8. I was very happy for him. He had real dignity in his undershirt of the kind big-city Italians and serious white trash wore. The best thing was that he was unconscious of being out of line at all. It was hard to imagine Harold charging in the vanguard, or even hiding in a frozen hole, against the Communists in Korea, with his ascetic thinness, his hairy arms and chest, thrown against some garlicky horde and their bugles. Harold was not a coward, I’m sure, but I saw another thing suddenly about him, this partisan of Wilde and Errol Flynn: Harold was maybe doomed to no scandal of his own at all. He was too open, too egregious (a word I assure you I didn’t know then) to have one, especially there in his undershirt in the fifties. But he wanted one so badly, and one for all his friends like me. He fed wistfully on the few scraps thrown his way in our dull society.
When the symphony director and several doctors and lawyers were tracked down and filmed by city police in the old city auditorium—usually a venue for wrestling—preening in women’s underwear and swapping spit, Harold howled “Impeccable!” He hoped, he wanted so, for them all to be driven to the city limits sign and hurled out in shame down a notch of high weeds, their red panties up between their white buttocks. An M.D. was exposed in a zealous ring of coprophiliacs, sharing photographs at parties centering on soiled diapers. “There is a god! God is red!” In Harold’s senior year, here came a lawyer exposed for teen pornography, hauling girls over state lines. Again Harold trembled, but there was always a bit of sadness that he himself was not cut down and hauled off—he loved most the phrase “spirited away”—for some dreadful irredeemable disclosure.
Harold never worried himself about the life after scandal. He indicated that he was, in fact, carrying on lugubriously after a lurid bomb in his past (not the bomb, but a bomb), but I think he was playing me false, for the first time. He wanted it so much, and lived from one minor scandal to the next, but as I say, I never expected him to be blindsided by disclosure after I saw him that day when I was seventeen. I got the sudden sense of Harold as finished, even though he was shy of thirty, too transparent and happy in his sins. He would never get the scandale d’estime he so wanted. I had even thought that Harold wanted badly to be gay—queer, we said then—but could not bring it off. He was a theater queer around me sometimes, but you knew he couldn’t cross over the line, it wasn’t made for him, or he for it.
Harold was one of the few around who knew about the existence of Samuel Beckett, and he hailed the man, perfectly ordered in his obliquity for Harold—an Irishman close to Joyce, veteran of the French underground, who lived in Paris, wrote in French, and had absolutely no hope. Drama couldn’t get any better than Waiting for Godot, whose French title he would call out now and then like a charm, appropriate to nothing at hand I could see. Harold felt Godot was written in “direct spiritual telepathy” to veterans of Korea. He skipped nicely over the fact he never fought the war and I could agree that he was a telepathic cousin to them, because Harold was not, whatsoever, a phony. I was always struck by the fact he felt so sore and deep about particular people, and I felt dwarfish in my humanity, compared with him. Harold had seen Godot in Cambridge, and when it began playing in the South he drove his squat-rocket, mange-spotted ocher Studebaker far and wide to cities and college campuses to view it again. He would do the same for West Side Story, which he regarded as the highest achievement in musicals, ever. He saw the movie a number of times. Sometimes he’d take one or more of the odd girls with him, and once he asked me. He intended to drive all the way to Shreveport to see it again. He said I would see the kind of girl I wanted to marry in Natalie Wood and would hear the music of one of America’s few uncontested geniuses, Leonard Bernstein. Then we would dip back to see a production of Godot in Baton Rouge, which, he warned, I was not really old enough for but needed because even a dunce could tell it was “necessary” for any sensate member of the twentieth century.
My mother was not enchanted. She was not happy about my trip with Harold, and much unhappier when she saw him, balding and with one of those cork-tipped Kools in the side of his mouth, behind the wheel of that car. I was a little embarrassed myself, because my folks put high stock in a nice car, and Mother was very sincere about appearances. I had told her Harold had ulcers, though I don’t know how it came up. But when she said “He shouldn’t smoke with those ulcers,” I could tell she was much concerned by more than that. Neither was Harold throwing any charm her way. He never had the automatic smarm and gush in the kit of most Southern men at introduction. I knew he was too experienced for that, but Mother didn’t like that he was a Korean near-vet, this old, just now going to college, and my friend. I waited for him to light up with just a bit of the rote charm, but he wouldn’t. He looked bored and impatient, thinking probably she owed him thanks for taking this probationary brat off her hands for a weekend. I was conscious that she thought he might be queer, so I just told her outright he wasn’t.
“Harold has many women,” I said, picking up my bag. She looked at me more suspiciously than ever. I just piled in, we left, and I was unsettled five ways as this rolling mutant of the V-2 went off simpering with its weak engine. Harold said nothing to cheer me up. Then he finally spoke, across the bridge after Vicksburg.
“Your father’s a very lucky man.”
“You know him?”
“No, fool. Your mother’s fine, A-plus fine. I’d die for her. A woman like that loved me, I’d cut off an arm.”
Again, Harold seemed to be talking way beyond his years, and I believe
now he must have thought of himself as extremely old. But it was the first time I realized my mother was a well-dressed, finely put together woman, and I began looking at her anew after that. Harold sat so wordlessly in silhouette in the car—I wondered if he was stunned and putting the make on her. With my mother. What impeccable depravity, as he might have said.
I had a little dance combo at the high school. Harold had come to see us, and he bragged on my trumpet playing, many notes and very fast, but, unfortunately, no soul. Soul might come to me if I was patient, he said. It could happen to Southern boys, look at Elvis, and he went on to call Roy Orbison much better than Elvis. You must hear that voice, he said, but he failed to get it on the lousy scratching radio. What came in almost solid was a special kind of Studebaker music, mournful like somebody calling over another lost radio. He predicted men like that were going to make horns obsolete shortly, and Harold was dead right. By the time I finished college, nobody wanted to hear anything but guitar and voice. Even pianos were lucky to get a chip in here and there. I was destroyed by the absolute triumph of the greasers, the very class I and my cronies pointedly abhorred. Maybe there is no class hatred like the small towner with airs against unabashed white trash.