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"And why? Why not take the loss?" I asked.
"Why? Because, man, I've been lied to, stolen from, and shit on for the last time. It's too much. Nobody pushes me around any more, man," he said.
"And how do you know I didn't take the loss?" I asked.
"Nobody pushes you around either," he said.
"No, I guess not," I said. "Guess not."
The adjutant had us out in an hour. In another half hour we sat with a bottle of black-market Dewar's – bought with my money because Morning discovered his loss – in the hotel. I was very numb, but tired too, and the Scotch seemed to run to my legs and weaken them, divide the very cells holding the muscles together. It seemed I should feel more, something more, anger, rage, shame, something about the loss of Teresita and my stripes in the same day, but for now I was just tired. The rage mounted behind Morning's unfocused eyes, but I was just tired.
(The night Ell left with Ron Flowers to go to his apartment, after Ron and I had argued about going to Mississippi for the summer project, and he had drawn the switchblade he had carried without using since he was ten, and I called him a nigger, then broke his arm, saying, "I will not be pushed"; after Ell left, saying, "You don't need me. You always win. You just never lose. I can't stand that," and I crying to her back fleeing through the door, "But I thought that was what a man was for," and my voice echoing in the empty hallway, "was for," and the past tense striking me like a boot in the face, and the loneliness clawing in on quick feet, not just Ell gone, but the world gone from me, and I screamed into the empty hall again, "But, baby, I'm losing now. Goddamn, I'm losing, and the losers are wi
I left the table once to pry open the window, to flee the conditioned air, but found only the stink of the sea's dumb expanse, the growl of the streets, and a hot breath on my face as some tired mad hound raced toward me through the night.
"Money can't buy friendship," I said to the sweating dog.
After the first quart, we ordered another even though Morning was already as drunk as one man should be. He hadn't stirred from the table, except to take a leak, and he drank straight from the bottle. I had been as still as he, after trying the window, and may even have been as drunk, but I was silent, counting the blossoms on the flowered wallpaper, while he constantly mumbled to himself, his whispers like bees in the room, his hands flying about his face. And when I wasn't counting, I was just there. Sad and numb, the way it is when you catch a good one on the jaw and in that time between the fist and the darkness you float away from the world, consciousness unco
"Hey, man, you know what that mother said?"
"Who? What? No," I said, moving over to the bed, perhaps to feign sleep. I didn't care what any mother said.
"That crooked fucker," he grunted, "that head Dick Tracy."
"No," I said, my eyes closed, drifting.
"No, what?"
"No, I don't know what he said, and I don't much give a damn."
"Oh, yeah. Well, he said that broad was a Billy Boy, the one at the house. What a bunch of shit." He slapped the table.
"Huh?"
"The broad. The mother said she was a Billy Boy queer chomping on my root, man." He hit the table top again.
"So what. Who gives a shit. Queer, smear. Go away."
"I give a shit, that's who," he said, now hitting the table with his fist. "I give a shit. But it wasn't."
She had been a big broad, and could have been. I'd seen Billy Boys who looked more like women than men, and I wanted to go to sleep, so I said, "Could have been."
I thought he was coming for me, which woke me up, but he just sat at the table, pounding it until I made him quit, shouting kill the mother-fucker until I quieted him with a weak drink from the second bottle, which the bellhop showed up with in the nick of time. He blubbered until I asked him what was wrong.
I asked; he took the rest of the night to tell me; I shouldn't have asked.
HISTORICAL NOTE 2
I can only tell the story that Joe Morning told me. There might be some advantage in trying to re-create his voice, except that he was so drunk that night he seemed to have lost his voice, the voice I knew, the intelligent, articulate voice which he could usually maintain, which he had maintained on other nights even as he fell drunk to the floor. But not this night. He mumbled, coughed, laughed, perhaps even lied. His words ran in confused flight from his mouth, the truth pouring out of his head like wine from a broken pitcher. He told the story without any sort of order, repeating himself, skipping about in time, across place. Unless you knew him as I did, his story, told in his words, would only confuse you, so I've taken the historian's liberty of retelling it as I know it. There are some disadvantages to this method, agreed; it would be easy to twist this method to my own purposes and, of course, there is some twisting always going on, but please accept it, as one accepts Gibbon on Rome, Carr on the Soviet Union, Prescott on the conquest of Mexico. Krummel on Joe Morning. As this is my truth, not the truth; take it with a grain of bitter salt in your beer.
He called himself Linda Charles, and Joe Morning first saw him (her?) in a nightclub in San Francisco. The other men performing in the show were professionally good, but obviously men, betrayed by a walk too exaggerated, a hand too strong, a wig as stiff as frosting on a ma
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.