In the dorm halls we passed by those rooms here and there with the queer and the hapless in them: Thomas, Don Thing, Ashlet; a boy whose stomach swelled up periodically, a boy whose face had been jerked askew by polio, a boy with an enlarging wen whose head bucked, a boy with purple acne, a dwarf, a pale giant; then there were the sissies, the religious maniacs, the homosexuals, including the compulsive ear-to-tongue man of the Hilltop Theater, and last — I don’t mean there weren’t a bunch of good fellows and honest scholars around too (the president of the college was an honest scholar who learned my name and always wished me well) — last there were the ones who looked so ordinary it was morbid. A number of people seemed to have come to Hedermansever so as to use the college as a sort of proving ground for their afflictions, wanting to know how far they could push into the world before it spat them out. I hope they all had good luck, and I don’t feel heroic even recalling them but they were there, and I lay down to sleep a few cells away from them, perfect of body, good wind, good arm and leg, afflicted with a nervous gloom, feckless. I dreamed about old Geronimo, peering out miserably from a cage in the zoo of American history.
When Fleece left the next morning, I walked over to his radio console and picked up the cavalry pistol. I looked out in the dorm yard. I recalled that, back in the fall, my German teacher had announced to us that the Cuban blockade was on. Soviet ships were making toward it, lower Florida was full of soldiers, and only divine intervention could help now. So she led the class in prayer. I looked around; most of the class had their eyes closed. A special prayer service in the chapel had been called. I myself had on the reptilian coat and was fondling the pistol in my pocket. I felt no dismay. Let them come, let the Russians hit the coast, take Gulfport, up Highway 49, overwhelm Hattiesburg, Collins, Magee, Mendenhall, D’Lo, send a corps over to conquer Hedermansever, building by building. A few of us meaner men would get our share from the windows. I saw all the scurrying brown raincoats in the dorm yard, sighted down the cavalry pistol. It would be all quite keen and simple.
12 / Return to Vicksburg
I rubbed off all the green. I slipped a handkerchief through the slides and yanked them loose. Then I rubbed them with Vaseline and treated the valves with Conn oil. I ran water in the bell and that ancient ferny sludge of ‘58 to ‘62 washed out Now I had a horn again. In with the Bach mouthpiece, on with the lips. Not bad. I did a few exercises I’d memorized from the Arban book and then went straight to jazz. It seems I could put more notes to the measure than ever before. I could play higher and brighter. Fleece wanted to know if I intended to practice in the room. I told him I had nowhere else. He checked out.
A drummer I knew down the hall, who was in the marching band and was a corny sort of fool, actually, heard me and brought down his snare drum, sat down, and began hitting for me. I couldn’t go long the first night. But by the fourth night I had built up a lip, and Joe the drummer from Texas was giving me time on a complete trap-set he had borrowed. A fellow from Yazoo City was doing the bass part on a cello. The cello was owned by his roommate, a student evangelist who wanted eventually to use the instrument as a part of his appeal, and who was out of town now on a revival circuit. Silas, who had the cello now, had learned his strings on country guitar and wasn’t very good plucking the thing, at first. But by the fifth night he was sounding the rhythms well enough and hitting a note every now and then. The sixth night, the hall people got Dave, the dorm counselor, and he pounded on the door. This man was blind in one eye, but enormous and hairy, a cycloptic wrestler sort. I never knew he was a physical coward until he came to the door.
“Nothing but crap and corruption comes out of this room. People are trying to study and sleep! Look at these crayon marks all over this door! I’m getting you for room deposit! What’s this, drums in here?” He didn’t see well and I think he thought he was screaming at Fleece alone.
Our cello man, Silas, stood up and crowded the door. Silas was also enormous. He was an athlete who had failed at Yale, his father’s alma mater. He lived in a constant rage over the general piety of Hedermansever and toadies like Dave, who kept the locks on it. His father had given thousands to Hedermansever, being a millionaire in chemical fertilizers and also a big Baptist. I suppose Dave knew some of this at least.
“We’re sitting down playing jazz music. This man”—Silas stood aside and pointed to me—“has a mute in his horn and is playing wonderfully. We are keeping it as down as we can. You … shitbound cocksuckers …” Silas dragged the cello like a piece of gorgeous trash, as Dave and the hall complainers minced back. “Who haven’t ever heard anything like this—”
“Get him for room deposit, I have to,” Dave was murmuring.
“You see this crayon picture on the door, Dave. That’s abstract art. You know why these boys made this picture? I’ll bet they did it because these white walls and halls and rooms were looking a little too much like a hospital for sanctimonious one-eyed fuckers, and for all the rest of you maggoty little finks around that one-eyed fucker.” He had lifted the cello.
“There are rules,” Dave said, against the other wall.
“I hope you mention some rules to me again, Dave. Me and you’re the biggest two men in this dorm. You mention rules again, I want to crack your cocksucking bones and let these little maggots watch me. I want you to make a phone call tonight, after you go downstairs, so somebody else will see me about some rules.”
It was amazing. Dave and the others simply rambled back to their rooms, stepping on each other quietly. I liked Silas. I liked his power over the college. I’d seen him up at the Hilltop a number of times and thought he was one of those football players who hadn’t made it at Ole Miss or Delta State and had come to Hedermansever for action in the small college league. He wore tee shirts with numbers front and back, and floppy jeans; he was freckled, his nose was broken or beaked, and he sprawled about. I found out he had not failed at Yale because of hate for it. I got the idea that he was so excited, being there, that he couldn’t write down anything in the classroom. On Yale, the East, Connecticut, and New York, he was still all babbling awe. He had had such Jewish and Polish and Greek friends. At Hedermansever he spent a good deal of his time lifting bar-bells, playing soccer with one other guy out on the football field, and searching for, as he said, meaningful group things. Never in my life had anybody taken up for me like he did against Dave and the hall people.
By, say, the eighth night, he was making a curious sort of progress on bass-part cello. He got a ripping, thrumming sound out of every note he made, no matter how fast we played, and I began dipping the tones, traveling with the bends of the cello sometimes; Joe the drummer fell on the tones and the thrums with great hustle — and Joe indeed could play. So I thought we might have something, just us three, no piano. It was odd, with no chording as you played. I suppose I thought of it as brave. It was intrepid, is what it was. I thought we were ready for the applause and the money. And I knew the club in Vicksburg. I wanted to have another chance at Vicksburg. The hills were fat and green, the ditches were steep, the houses hung on slants of old gloom, and the river was a rich ooze, like tears and whiskey. It would be fine to be happy in the cellars of this town, cutting away with some buddies on horn.