Nevertheless, she had gone to the chairwoman about Smith’s asthmatic style. She loved his hungover explosions, but complained that he cut them too short and she was not getting her money’s worth. Smith was incredulous. It was his first experience with a vocal minority, the angry disabled woman. Angel B. was very serious about her writing — very bad — and viewed it as her only salvation. He was not imparting the secrets of the art to her. She must know everything, no holding back. All this with a punk’s greediness and nearly solid blue language, the bells shaking. Smith noted that he made no complaint about the bells. Smith planned to kill her and insist on one of her prettier banalities for her headstone, so that she could be mocked for centuries. But this man Drum loved her even as the talentless bitch she was. How could he be here offering to help Smith?
“What can we do, Paul?” Drum was whispering and uncle-ish. The two girls nodded their wishes to help too. Smith looked them over. He was already half in love with the taller one, pretty with lean shanks, who looked like she was right then slipping into a bathtub with Nietzsche, that lovely caution about her. The other was pre-Raphaelite, a mass of curly hair around a pale face very oval, the hair coiled up on her cheeks and separating for the full lips.
“We could drink,” said Smith, dying for a taste. He was imagining a long telescope of whiskey and soda through which to view these newcomers to his pain. He liked people waving like liquid images, hands reaching toward him.
At home the end was near. His wife, just out of the tub, would cover her breasts with her arms as she went to her drawers in their bedroom. Smith watched, alarmed and in grief. No old times anymore. She meant, These are for something else, somewhere else down the road. He had hoped to hang on to ambivalence just a little bit longer. He wanted her more than ever. He said unforgettable, brutal things to her. His mouth seemed to have its own rude life. Here he was, no closer to her than a ghoul gazing through a knothole to her toilet, the hole rimmed with slobber, in their own big smart house.
They all went to the Romeo Bar on the university strip. Smith saw Drum drive up with the girls in a bleached mustard Toyota with a bee drawn on it at the factory. Smith thought it was an art statement, but it was not. Drum was poor.
He wore unironed clothes, things deeply cheap, dead and lumpy even off the rack at bargain barns, and the color of harmful chemicals, underneath them sneakers with Velcro snaps instead of shoestrings. The clothes of folks from a broken mobile home, as a pal of Smith’s had described them. Drum at fifty-six lived upstairs in a small frame house of asbestos siding. In the lower story lived his mother, whom he called the Cobra. The brand of his smokes was Filter Cigarettes. His beer was white cans labeled Beer.
Nothing surprised Drum, and the girls were rapt as Smith poured forth. He was a bothered half-man, worn out by the loss of heart and music of the soul.
Drum agreed about the times, entirely. “There should be only a radio in every home, issuing bulletins on the war. The war of good against evil. That’s all the news we need,” he said, directing the bar air like a maestro. “But all they give us is facts, numbers, times. Enough of this and nobody cares about the war anymore. Why, all television addresses is the busybody in everybody!
“We’re born to kill each other. First thing in the morning we take something to numb us, then parachute into the sordid zones of reality. Layers of dead skin on us, layers!” he finished.
Everything surprised the girls. They seemed to adore being confidantes in Drum’s presence. They were anxious to become writers and have sorrows of their own. The grave male details of Smith’s distress the girls thought exquisite. That through a knothole looking at her toilet thing was beautiful, said the pre-Raphaelite Minny.
Later, they all stayed over at Smith’s green hovel by the railroad tracks he’d rented as his writing place, a heartbreaking first move toward divorce. Minny took ether and began talking about her enormous clitoris, a thing that kept her in nerves and panic every waking hour. Pepper passed out before she could recall any true sorrow. Drum went back in the kitchen with some of Smith’s stories. He had on half-glasses bought at a drugstore, and Smith saw him foggily as a god: Charles Bronson as a kitchen god. Smith retired with Minny.
Then in the morning his wife knocked on the door. Smith answered in a leather overcoat, nude underneath. He was stunned by drink and ether, and his wife’s presence simply put a sharpness on his wrecked eyesight. Behind him in a bedsheet sat Minny in front of a drum set. She was sitting there smiling at Smith’s palomino-haired wife. It was her first scandal, she told them later.
His wife said something about divorce papers, and Smith slapped her. She rammed the door shut.
“Oh, how Old World!” Minny cried. She dropped the sheet and rose naked and curly like something from a fountain. Already Smith was tired of her. He loved Pepper, the lean beauty who could not get her sorrow out, asleep in the rear room.
“That’s no good, Paul. You shouldn’t hit” Drum had awoken and come out. His big fingers were around a fresh cold beer. “Oh, I hit my second wife. She thrived on it. Some women like hitting, they work for it. But it’s a bad thing. A man of your sensitivity, with that sad little child in you, you won’t survive, is what I’m saying.”
“I love the sad child!” said Minny.
“But it makes an end to things at least. You need to end things, Paul. Purgatory is much rougher than hell. Well I know. You’ve got to wish them well, and be off. Wish them well in love, hope they have good orgasms.”
“My God!” Smith could not imagine this charity. Sometime later in the week Smith asked Drum how he’d lost three wives.
“Because I was a failure, man!” Drum seemed delighted. “I wrote and wrote and couldn’t get published. I quit all my jobs. I’d had it with facts, the aeronautics industry. Working plans to fly in a coal mine, baby! The heart, Paul, the heart, that’s where it is.”
On the last of his GI bill the man was taking ceramics, photography, sculpture, and Smith’s writing class.
“I pride myself on being a dilettante! I am looking for accidental successes. Heart accidents. I want to slip down and fall into something wonderful!”
As for Drum’s physical heart, there was a bad thing running in his family. His father and two older brothers had gone out early with coronaries, and he himself took nitroglycerin tablets to ward off angina.
Even Smith’s punk band excited Drum. Anything declamatory of the heart moved him. He was very often their only audience. He applauded and commended, through their vileness. They switched instruments, versatile in absence of talent. It didn’t matter.
“Everything must be explored! Nothing left untouched!” Drum shouted, slugging down his cheap beer, smoking his generics.
They played their own “Yeast Infection Blues” and a filthy cover of George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” The regular guitarist was a vicious harelip pursued all over town for bad checks. The singer was a round man with dense eyeglasses and a squint who sold term papers to fraternity boys. They called him the Reverend. The bass-man was a boy who never wore shoes, hardly bathed, and in appearance approached the late Confederate veterans around Appomattox — gaunt, hang-necked, and smutty. Drum absorbed them all. They were his children, junior alcoholics to Smith. Sometimes he’d dance with Minny or Pepper. They shook the little green house and the police came. Perfect.