“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.
13 / Rambler
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.
We were coming back one night when we hit the stop-light by the library and I thought of the books all of a sudden and jumped out of the car, telling Fleece to take it on to the dorm.
“I can’t drive,” he said.
I shouted for him to just ease down on the gas and keep a foot on the brake, everything was automatic. Bobby Dove flapped and protested, but I saw the car buck around the campus turn all right.
There was a mean gloom in the library; huge plaster rooms, green tiles on the floor. There were a lot of older night-school sorts here. I was about to burst. I wanted the basement restroom primarily. However, it was my idea to swoop across in the basement stacks and pick up the books on Geronimo, take them into the restroom with me, read about the old rogue in the ecstasy of relief, then perhaps climb out the restroom window possessing the books forever.
By the time I went down to the right row, I was humbled by agony. I gimped down the row, holding on the tier, and started parting the books. They were gone. I wanted Lieu-tenant Britton Davis’s Geronimo and Betzinez’s I Rode With Geronimo, and Geronimo’s Own Story. Somebody had them. I broke wind incredulously.
“My word,” says a prissy voice from one of the carrels at the end of the row. The sound had not been moderate. I was in sublime comfort. I mean the comfort of a wiener who has been a balloon. I made my way toward the voice.
“And who are you?” said the round monk graduate student. You knew none of the graduate students were any ac-count or they wouldn’t be at Heder man sever.
“What kind of person are you?”
He had my books. The red beans and rice had resurged with a little pain to me. I told him the books he had were mine. Including that one in his hand.
“I happen to be entertaining myself with the exploits of an Indian who may figure into my Master’s thesis. As a matter of fact I think I will use him.”
“Give. C’mon. I’m in a hurry.”
“Shall I see Mrs. Finger about graduate student priorities?”
“I’ll hit you in the face unless you give me the books.” Fair deal, he seemed to agree. He handed them over in a wise flabbergasted way.
“One bully after another,” he sighed. With this I knew he was queer. Just about bald, ring on his finger — a wife, kids, all of them bullies. Taking the Master’s degree just to get out of the house. Being argumentative in class, being as British and sardonic as he could be, trying like hell to abolish his Mississippi accent. I didn’t know all of this then, of course. But I sat down with the same types in my later schooling.