Morning felt a vague, guilty excitement heat the drinks in his belly, as probably did most of the men in the audience. The forbidden thing: taking on the trappings of woman, imitating the beauty of woman. And with the beauty, the forbidden wisdom, the possibility of being a receptacle for the seed, being the gift rather than the giver, possessing a firm lovely breast for your own, a slim silken leg which must ache with pleasure as it moves against its mate. Morning started to rise, but smart enough not to betray his fright, fearing the fear the fright might betray, he stayed through to the end.
But when he left, the perfume of fear followed him, and he took his already generalized guilt, too, and perhaps mistook the one for the other. He had been punished so much, he must be guilty of something. Perhaps this? Who knew?
During his junior year of college, Joe Morning had been sitting on a car fender in front of his fraternity house, drunk, watching, but not taking part in, a springtime panty raid on a nearby girls' dorm. He could act the part of the amused observer because in his basement room in the frat house lay a drunk coed from the very dorm being raided, naked but for her loafers. Earlier in the evening he had, with his silver tongue and a pint of Southern Comfort, persuaded the girl to climb into his ground level window. And now, fresh fucked and smiling, he had come out to investigate the noise.
But when the police came to stop the raiders, which a single dorm mother with a Coke bottle had already done, and to stop the girls hanging out the second-story windows who were waving lace-fringed encouragement, they arrested everyone in sight, including the irate dorm mother who had assaulted an officer of the law on his way upstairs to stop those silly girls, and including innocent bystander, Joe Morning.
"Man, I'm not doing anything," he said to the cop who tried to pull him off the car. "I been sitting here all the time."
"Oh, sorry, boy; thought you was a girl-child, sitting there with all that hair," the cop drawled as he stepped back. "Let's go."
"Fuck off, peckerwood. I haven't done a thing."
"You just did," the cop said as Morning tried to jerk away. He skillfully stabbed him in the stomach with his billy, slid him off the hood, twisted an arm behind, and guided him to the wagon. At the steps Morning struggled slightly, more to get his breath than to resist, and in the scuffle was jabbed again, but managed to vomit in the cop's red fat face. The cop laid Morning out with the billy against his neck, then stood over him, thumping his ribs until another cop stopped him.
Morning awoke face down on a thin mattress on a cement floor, his hands painfully cuffed behind him, his feet shackled and tied to an iron ring in the wall, and his ribs blue, bruised, and aching. The tiny cell was hardly wider than the mattress, and a solid steel door with a small sliding plate over a barred window protected the world from this innocent bystander. Morning shouted until a jailer came to tell him to shut up or be gagged or worse, and Morning complained that he needed to pee, the Southern Comfort no comfort now, but the cop explained that there would be a time in the morning for toilet, and that the prisoner best not piss in the cell 'cause that would be defacing city property, which carried a minimum fine of one hundred dollars. As the cop spoke, which seemed to take hours, Morning noticed that his head felt bald against the mattress, and realized that his hair was gone. He asked why. It was explained that no dirty beatnik pinko was bringing fleas or lice into this jail which had been awarded a plaque from the governor for being the cleanest jail in the state. Morning said that he was honored to stay there, but he sure would like to pee. The cop slammed the plate back over the barred window, saying, piss in one a your books.
Morning, of course, couldn't hold his bladder, though he tried, so spent the rest of the night laying in his own waste and stink, cursing the world for that waste and stink. Damn, it had always been this way. Expelled from school for someone else's smoke in the John; whipped by his mother for the kid next door's lies; punished at random for the sins of others, he took to sins of his own, smoking, lying to his mother, and he was never caught.
The next day he found himself charged with disturbing the peace, resisting arrest and, yes, defacing city property. Morning pleaded not guilty and asked for a lawyer, but the justice of the peace said guilty without looking up, dismissed the resisting charge, sentenced him to two hundred dollars or two months in jail. Morning shouted appeal, but the justice of the peace told him no appeal was allowed for misdemeanors in that state.
Morning settled himself for two months, though he had the money in the bank, but the city called his mother. It seemed they'd rather have the money than Mrs. Morning's son. She paid the fine that afternoon, and as she walked out to the street with him, she asked, "Joe, Joe, what are you going to do next? What are you going to do?" He walked away without speaking.
Back in his room he found a note from the assistant dean of men, asking him to leave school. Morning ran still stinking and dirty to the dean's office up the quiet, pleasant, shaded hill, but the dean refused to see him, saying, in a precise Tidewater voice, You're not one of our students; our students are Southern gentlemen; please leave my office.
"Southern gentlemen suck cock," he said, and left the office.
He drank the rest of the afternoon in the cool basement. The chapter president sent a pledge to tell Mr. Morning to please move out of the room, but Mr. Morning sent the pledge back up to tell Mr. President to come down to try to make him do anything. Mr. President didn't come, but the vice-president did: Jack, Morning's high school buddy buggered by the two farmers that night after they had lost the state championship. He stood in the open door, his face composed, ready for the pitch, acting as if he had forgotten the hate of that night, acting as if he were big enough, as he had said, to forgive and forget, stood there in loafers, gray slacks, a crew-neck sweater, for the winter chill still clung in Morning's basement though spring had come two weeks before.
"Joe, boy, what's the matter with you? Where did you go wrong?" He had been taking business psychology. "You came down here a football star, a stable, straight, clean guy. Then you quit football, the thing you do best of all, calling it stupid, throwing away all those hours of intense preparation. Boy, you better believe, if I could have played as well as you, I would have never quit. But you quit, threw all that God-given talent away. Then you moved down in this dirty basement, down to this damp dirty room with all your fine library of books stinking with mold, and this place stinks like a… a… a nigger whorehouse," he said as Morning tossed a pair of stained panties at his feet. "You bring girls down here, and to the parties, you wouldn't want your mother to meet. And you haven't had a hair cut, till now, since God knows when. And you sit down in Mickey's with those damned pinkos. Joe, I don't know, I just don't know. I know you're good inside, but the things the brothers say about you. Sometimes it hurts me real bad to hear them." While he talked, Jack had been carefully removing mildewed books and dirty clothes from a chair. He sat down, clasped his hands in front of a knee, and said, "And this hurts me most of all, Joe. The chapter voted you out this morning. Mind you, we can't vote you out of the national body. I mean once you are a member of this fraternity, you are a member for life, just like when you joined the church. But they can vote you out of the house. I talked for you, but in a case like this an officer just has one vote, too. It really hurts me, Joe. We been together a long time. I just don't know."