Payne
The first time self met Payne was ‑
as Payne himself so recently reminded him at Dad's funeral, Henry looking
unbelievably aged tottering on the edge of the pit they dug for Dad, a
shambling old man penalized by the sagging muscles all that lifetime of ape's
work had put on his frame, Payne at his side no longer the spotty twenty year
old of memory's automatic evocation but a thick necked, swank looking - yes,
swank, a word Dad might have used, a big band era word but just right to
describe the slightly bogus odor of Payne's virility - almost forty year old
success, a made man, with a dark suit and the spicy smell of a male cologne
mixing with the good bean soup smell of his sweat on the humid May air, a black
flower pinned to his lapel, nice touch, self shaking hands with him almost
swimming in the warmth exuded from his broad, tanned, moist face, hot out here
ain't it, you all ought to visit me down there in Miami, heck, after this,
bring your wife, to Julia, you haven't even met mine yet, Cindy, self is your
newest one, and Payne is I'm a little rock off the old Gibraltar when it comes
to women, poking his father, maybe falling into schtick, a bit, wonder if he
really talks like that, but I have something more important in my life right
now than the party life, to Julia going
Cindy couldn't believe that you were the Julia Labreton, I have a little girl
that surely idolizes you, they would love it if you folks came down ‑ was, was
when, was at fifteen, self visiting Uncle Henry for two months, July and
August. In Shreveport. To work for him, that was the deal, self
having come up with this idea himself.
Break away from being stoned all the time, it was starting to get
depressing, all him and Mark ever talked about any more. Self is into transforming reality, but he was
starting to long long long for just a little of that reality to work with.
Yesterday gets foggy, the day before gets even foggier, soon you don't know if
it has been raining all week, it sure does feel like it. Of course he didn't
mention this aspect of the case to Mom and Dad, who remained officially unaware
of their son's chemical tinkering with his brain cells; who were, in fact, a
little afraid to make the fact finding foray into his room, there in the
basement, or to ask about his disconnection, his tranced distance from them,
dinner after dinner. By the time Payne
is reminding him of that summer self has ordained an official image of this
time, an image of morbid inwardness, son of the Fall of the House of Usher (the
Roger Corman version) without the horse to gallop around on, he likes to give people a rather exaggerated
picture of dosages, of himself and Mark sitting around like Gladstone's only
hippie underground, he likes to dwell on the vandalism among the synapses, oh
that dopamine cowboy, there he is, yucking it up deep in the pleasure center.
People who know self eventually end up knowing this shit, making jokes, snide
comments, his students for instance, he must tell them, but he has been shocked
at least once, years before, that there is another at least version of himself, Mom's to
Julia's, her telling Julia in the kitchen (self supposedly watching the
football game with Dad and Brian in the living room but no, folks, really
standing in the doorway, or not exactly in it so you could see him, the old
urge to sneak around kicking in whenever he came home) listening to the women
talking, Mom and Julia and Dita, self always has a feeling about the women
talking, like he's set on cracking that code, and Mom creating a fabulously
normal self, so talkative at the dinner table, his school day, his homework on
the business desk moved downstairs from Dad's office upstairs, his dates, the
time he insisted on going out and working for Uncle Henry one summer,
toughening himelf up for, check this out, the soccer team next fall, Mom having
not a clue what a nest of pot and acid heads that soccer team really was, I
mean who else plays soccer in high school in Georgia! His life, out of Mom's
mouth, horribly touched by some tv oriented narrative, his rebellion cheapened,
wasn't it rebellion? He would have burst in and pointed out his Luciferian
sincerity, but he was afraid that they would all laugh at him. Briefly, his
image of his teen‑hood was dissolved, and in its place he saw an other self, a
hypothetical self fitting neatly into all the exterior points of his
biography. He still, back then, standing
silently just out of their sight, didn't have the distance. Now of course
distance was no problem. He had distance in spades. Oddly enough, this
particular moment, with its slight tinge of inexplicable humiliation, carries
him back to the pure claustrophobia of fifteen, to the feeling of being glued
to his high school and the streets of his subdivision after dark ‑ a
subdivision now a little the worse for wear, Dad at the table predicting in ten
years time it will all be black, miles from Mom and Dad's new, two acre estate,
as Dad calls it half jokingly ‑ to the
comic book pathos of thinking that the whole thing was some sort of conspiracy
of diminishment. The limits of his world
adhered to his very skin, as though they were made of flypaper.
One of the great
things about being stoned with Mark was that then, they didn't.
So he hightails
it, this is how he would tell it most of the time, to Louisiana, (who has he
told this to?) years later, (nobody, hasn't told it in years) the day after the
funeral in fact, (or thought of it in years) Payne saying you were one skinny
mother weren't you, shaking his head, well those were the days, you seem to
have fallen into eating habits, reaching over with one large, tanned hand and
laying it on self's belly, as softly as if self were pregnant, self noticing
this the thick, gold plated ring on one
hairy finger, the wedding band on the other, this man, can't get over him, and
also Payne accomplishing this gesture,
imagine self sober with the tactile boldness, now, to reach out like that,
violate someones territory almost wilfully, is this what being a saleman does
for you, with such endearing gentleness self was having a hard time focusing on
the way that story should go, getting
one Payne from back in 1975, a gauche, sometimes violent boy he'd had a fight
with the last week he worked with him, together with this man from 1992. The
latter Payne was, after three days, beginning to seem alarmingly natural, the
old Payne, or rather the younger Payne, older than this older version, (making,
oh it hurts, the younger self only older, the age the older self carries with
him having this increasingly hideous young face which the older self doesn't
see, every morning, in the mirror) fading into its lineaments like some illness
he'd once had, an illness that self had had to witness, both of them like
revenants from some wilderness outpost met years later. Except he is not
getting that vibe at all from Payne. So
self has been thinking, okay, one more time, maybe this man has actually been
transformed, maybe the twenty year old he was was a mistake, hasn't self
himself said, like it was his credo, there is no core to your being, said this
to students, to other artists, to everyone, there's only some shapeshifting
emptiness, echo or psyche ... Maybe the mistake is the way self was perceiving
things, ever think of that? anything is possible now that Dad is dead, he
thinks, so it is the night before Payne is going to go, self says buddy, (all
of them sitting out there on the porch, Mom looking up from the 'thank you so
much for your thoughts in this time of grief', giving self a sharp glance over
her glasses) how about you and me going out for a drink. Which Payne accepted with alacrity, sure
cousin, somewhat surprising self. I'm getting a little itchy, let's do it. The
man is dying to go out on the town, of course! is self's thought, climbing into
his Infinity, man you must be something in sales down there, Bo (exaggerating
his Southern voice, a habit he keeps falling into with Payne), this baby must
cost, and Payne is boy, reversing like a heart attack up the driveway and into
the street, self finding himself flailing with seat belt, I'm a dealer, I have
a deal with another dealer, he's Japanese, I'm van, we cross-pollinate, forward
so self braces himself in the zero to sixty, hey this is a neighborhood street,
Bro, and that means I get to tool one around, it all comes out as business
expense, taxes you know, let the government pay for it. Payne pronounces it
gov'mint. In the back of his mind as they head south into the part of the metro
area self is still familiar with it's
I've found him now, that spotty boy isn't dead, that pussy hound, still
sure as shit driving like the redneck I used to know, I got him! as if this was
some immense victory, and he thinks I'll just watch, now, knowing that he is
falling into a delusion he has experienced quite a bit, recently, that he can
watch people and the force of that watching, the power of it, will force them
to materialize out of the tomb of appearance they lug around, the real spirit
haunting the tomb work of everyday life, ectoplasmic, blue, a wierd flicker in
the air around it, climbing with immense effort out of the waylaying bandages,
the cerements and ceremonies, will manifest itself, oh, not in any major
change, you have to have the tracking eye for it, you have to know what
signifies, here, in changes that are
subtle, changes of voice, the glance out of the side of the eye, a sudden burst
of out of context phrases, which self with his special gift will simply
receive, tuned to this frequency, his non-intervening, thin smile plastered to
his face. The spirit knows it is being ouijied out of there, and it doesn't
like it. Now self knows knows that this delusion is like the one he has that he
is the upside down man, a phrase he came up with years ago that haunts him, his
variation on the underground man, he'll be walking along normally, la de
da, and suddenly he'll think I'm the
upside down man and... Well, and. Things do seem to change, he has visions and
strangers come up to him in coffee houses and get intimate, sometimes
electricity leaks out of his fingers and he does his best work but he also
knows that, duh, things are naturally going to seem to change when you are out
of wack. His big fear right now is being out of wack, wrong time for that, Mom
needs, needs... something, comfort, love, he's called upon. Plus the dreadful
funeral, Aunt May staring at him under the gray mass of her foul fiend hair
like he was still the unforgiveable twenty-five year old, Jan avoiding him,
Julia having toubles with Aunt Lane, poor thing'd gone senile, her teeth kept
getting lost, not that it bothered her a bit, big smile to frighten the
neighbor's kids, wandering around asking where Jack was, why isn't Jack here?
And through all this he is feeling a certain palpable cry coming out from Mom,
one of those batzone cries that women emit, you are around them and suddenly
aware of something in your larger sense of hearing, some pang of abandonment.
Unbearable to think that he was in no position to do anything for her. Although
face it, it wasn't only for her, he's trying to understand, since the man whose
seed he comes from is dead, just what his life amounts to as a total thing. To
read it in his acts, and not imply its richness from his mere responses, from
the complex entertainments of his sensibility, fuck his sensibility, there are
times he hates his sensibility, he entertains himself all to much. A
real masturbator, this guy, self. Come
up with it, he keeps telling himself. A belief, some use to others. To an
other. To one separate other. Afraid he
can't. So Payne is something of a diversion. Still, self is curious, and he
wants to check out whether Payne has really changed that much. Afterwards he'll
figure out if that is a good thing or not. So he guides Payne to a small Country and Western inclined bar on Memorial
he'd been to with Chuck Forsyth last time he'd been in Atlanta, he was
wondering if Payne would start hinting around about going out to the Gold Club,
Cheetah's, some tittie bar. At the same time he is uncomfortable, why slander
the guy, you don't know anything about him, where do you get this attitude
from? A good question, but there's no time to go into it. Not with Payne sitting across from him at a table, telling
self how Cindy helped him find the Lord, making self groan, no, the same story
for three days running, can't be. Finally self has to tell him I'm suffering
from cognitive dissonance, here, just bear with me, puts both hands up and
grabs his hair, you are telling me you are not only a Jehovah's Witness, which
I respect because of your wife, she's one and you want to make her happy, I
understand that, but that you are happy being one, that here you are in Atlanta
away from her, Atlanta, Payne, tittie bar heaven, Payne, remember Bossier City,
and you are telling me, Bo (he keeps up with the Southern crap, Bo and Buddy
and Budro, where is it coming from?) all you want is to get back and go to
these whatever you call them, religious orgies. Payne nods, smiling at the idea
of them as religious orgies, already ‑ it has only been three days ‑ putting
down self's manner of speech as one of those quirks you find at family reunions
‑ like Cousin Buster the thirty year old bedwetter, or Aunt Verna, the child
severely poked who asks, Aunt Verna, why do you have a beard ‑ and altogether acting as though his
religion were a major accomplishment, as though after self saw him last he'd
gone on to become something as rare and admired as an astronaut, and he was
letting it out modestly in order not to hurt self's inferrable sense of the
comparative modesty of his accomplishments so far. Payne, in fact, come to
think of it, has been exerting this certain competitiveness since he's been up
here, although he lets it out in such mild doses that it is hard for self to
confront, especially given that he is at the same time trying to comprehend
Dad's death. Self is finding himself, lately, pointing out his own
accomplishments, in a really adolescent way, too, dropping the fact that he'd
been featured in various art mags, he'd been in fact only three years ago on
the cover of Art + Party, one of those eighties art mags in the big newspaper
format which Payne doesn't need to know is now defunct, had even found the old
copy in Mom's ceramic room, waving it around, Payne just as pleased, self
looking out that Julia doesn't come in upon them, can imagine her withering
remarks, you are showing him that bogus article? No, unfair, he's simply being
paranoid, he always gets a case of
Oedipal petulance when he's in his folks new house, which he always
thinks of as new even though they moved from Gladstone maybe ten years ago, the
new is that it is simply not the house he grew up in. It was just that the joke
about Street being a painter (what do you charge per room?) was wearing a
little thin, Julia said I thought it was funny, Street, he really did think
housepainter, self not so sure and also what is this with Julia's patience for
this bozo, not bozo, but he would have thought she might have at least some
sarcasm to direct at his let's say less than educated comments about a few
things, and also he was simply surprised that Mom was making so much of Payne,
I mean he was used to being in Julia's shadow, but Payne? I mean Payne is what,
some fucking car salesman, Julia goes not cars, vans, customized vans, well I
don't call that star quality, and his thing about Cindy, are we supposed to get
down on our hands and knees, like she's the fucking Madonna, he's just catching
us up on him Mom says, to lesser bitching, but okay. Okay, self goes, I'm mature, I can take this,
Dad's dead and I'm worried about this? So he's making the effort, but finally
he has to ask, what are you doing with this, then, self says, holding up
Payne's drink, or is your church less strict on drinking. Oh, Payne says, it is
one of the failings of the flesh but it isn't a major thing, Cindy drinks,
saying Cindy as though she embodied the soul's ascent, I mean when we go out,
never around the child, there are people who from the meetings who drink,
sometimes, it is just a matter of enjoying wisely. To tell you the truth, I'd
rather not. I used to love the stuff, but now the taste palls on my tongue.
I'll tell you another thing, I would love to get Daddy and Ma to move down to
Florida partly cause I think I could get him straight about, you know, his
beering himself up, I know what he
thinks, he thinks beer ain't alcohol, always says it is just beer. That is the way it goes with addicts, Street,
(what, has Julia been talking to him?) it is killing both them,(what kind of
look was that, I'm like Henry?) and I would never touch a drop again if my
prayer is answered there. But you know Daddy, he is stubborn, he still thinks
he's twenty, he thinks he's a rodeo star, he thinks he is still out there with
Patton. We feel, you and Cindy self interrupts, right, we feel that he should
have a community around him at his age,
there is his grandchild, there are good people, retired people, we know,
wonderful people his age come to the meetings, don't you think that it is never
too late to change? I mean I do, I am
convinced a man can be reborn at any moment in his life, don't matter if he is
ninety. I tell you what, if it was anyone but me suggesting it he'd be down
there now, like a shot, I mean what is there to do in that state he is living
in, you know that economy has gone to Hades in a handbasket there, but he is
such a proud eagle. I'm not putting him
down for a second, he raised me and that was damned hard business, I know
it. I respect him more than any man, I
want to do as much for my Teesha. So I
probably won't be giving up drink for his sake in the near future, unless there
is a miracle. Even then, thing is, I might just drink then for his sake, so he
doesn't feel I'm giving up anything. But
maybe I'll give it up for my sake, and then, you know what, crossing his arms
across his chest, when I do, you'll ask
me why I am such a prude. You can't please the world. I've learned that
one. I've tasted, I guess you could say,
something sweeter than wine.
Self sits there,
listens, tells Julia later, after Julia told him that Mom was a lot more
depressed than she was letting on, self knowing that and not liking the way
Julia was saying it as though self should be doing something, that he was
scrambling for his memories of that summer
when he went to Shreveport listening to Payne talking, it about drove
him crazy.
I think Payne is
very nice, says Julia, as if self was saying anything against him. Honey, I am
astonished that that is Payne, I think maybe Payne is dead in a ditch and this
guy, who looks just like him, has taken his place or something. It is one of
those crossed destinies things, two men who look just alike, Nabokov has some
story like that.
But Julia was
going to sleep, making that hmm, mm sound to self's remarks which was the
giveaway, leaving self to sort out that summer on his lonesome, living in
Henry's house. What a house. The house
had been built the year before self saw it, and the lot it was on, the acre,
was still dirt and weeds and clutter, a pile of bricks here, lumber there, a
heap of tarpaper and shingles over there, Henry not having bothered to even
make a show of caring about a lawn, so that every time it rained, and it rained
almost every day that humid summer, not a lot but punctually around three
o'clock in the afternoon, the water carried soil out of the yard into the road,
leaving a red stain in the road in front of the house and ruts in the yard a
half a foot deep. This didn't really make Henry an eccentric, though, the guy
in the neighborhood who is, for obscure
reasons of his own, trying to run down property values, as the road the house
was on was a rather odd offshoot of a road that ran through the pine woods
outside of Shreveport in the direction of Longview, Texas, and the other four
houses just never jelled, in all that waste country, as a suburb - they had
that frontier feeling of maybe this is a mistake, that lassitude as to
appearances, even down to what people wore, guys in what had to be boxer shorts
washing the car, women wearing nightgowns or two piece bathing suits at three
o'clock in the afternoon, coming out to check the mail, and so none of the
lawns of the houses would have passed muster in Gladstone, Georgia, even the
ones that did have grass. The house, Henry's house, was made of pink bricks. It
was, self thought, extraordinarily elongated.
This impression of it being longer than normal along one axis was caused
perhaps by it being a single level house, and so the line of it being
unrelieved by any feeling of volume or of height. Inside you immediately saw
that it divided into two wings; a division not so much of architecture as of
spirit, as though the very daydreams of the inhabitants of the house left a
material aura and odor in the rooms of their conceiving. One wing was Aileen's and Henry's, and this
consisted of their bedroom, the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, and
a laundry room/tool room, all done up in patriotic motifs. Like the wall paper,
which showed a pattern of American flags from every period, the round thirteen
stars from the Revolutionary times to the forty-eight stars of the fifties and
the fifty stars of today; there were, in addition, pictures of the presidents
on the wall in the kitchen and living room, and a picture of General Patton up
in their bedroom, over their bed, no less, where he presided over Henry and
Aileen's own battle of the Bulge, when they were in the mood - a joke, self
thought of it and thought of sharing it with someone, but there wasn't anyone.
There was also a sword and a fake blunderbuss in glass and oak cases mounted on
the wall in the living room behind the sofa. Self had the impression that Henry
must be a veteran from World War II, the house said veteran, somehow, and so
when he discovered two years later that during that time Henry was in Las
Vegas, that he was in prison - that he hadn't been, as he had vaguely supposed,
drafted - then it clicked that the veteran's air around Henry, that heavy
silence which seemed to fall inexorably over things in his presence, the very
walk of the man and the way he forked his food and the way he swallowed his
drink was, really, about the discipline of confinement. Okay, he thought,
that's it, the thing about Henry, the menace about him, he remembered thinking
this rather sadly that night with Payne, he would have liked to have talked
about it, to have been eloquent, very Southern, very much lets have two more
bourbons, to have been your Daddy, Payne, Payne in this scenario a little
cruder than he was, a little more pompous, from that summer I took away an
impression of Henry that has, as the
years have gone by and I have context to put it in, only crystallized, well you
know I presume that your Daddy was in prison? Payne of course starts to
splutter, that's a damn lie and you're a damn liar (yes, it would be like one
of those Tennesse Williams plays they used to make into movies in the fifties
and always had Paul Newman star in, here self would be, not only on one level
being mean to Payne, sure, he was being mean, but trying to break through the tangle
of silence, that tangle like... like Spanish moss, silence gone heavy and gray
and breaking the, well the tree of life, no, the family tree, no, the Spanish
moss is supposed to hint at how Southern the silence is, put an accent on it)
... you should know, Payne, both of them standing up at the table, staring into
each others eyes, in this scene there's a sudden quiet, only his voice, Payne's
heavy breathing, the detached click of one billiard ball knocking into another,
the players motionless with their cuesticks at arms, everyone stariing, I'm
sorry I have to tell you, no, cut, cut, wrong movie, what he wants really is
just to say son, you remember that time in Bossier, that place, what was it,
"The Fancy H"? To which Payne will say, suddenly smiling, yeah,
cousin. But he is the thing people don't know about vans... and self is, oh,
and, oh, really. Self just felt it back
then, there he is fifteen in this strange house, this strangers' house, he was
being instinctual, but now he could be discursive, now, looking back, he could
understand why he'd be in the house with Payne and he'd hear the front door
slam and know that Henry had come into the house and feel, suddenly, this pall
of silence creep over everything, as if Henry were some violent mute come to
bode no good. And, actually, Henry wasn't like that, he simply didn't talk
much, but if anything, he was indulgent with Payne. Self had witnessed working
out there with Henry that when he had something to say, he'd say it. If he
thought someone was fucking off, he'd ball them out and they'd stay balled out
until they did it right. Finally, in
this wing of the house, there was a room that was off of the kitchen, a raw
space, only sheetrocked, where Aileen had her washer and dryer and a large
freezer in which she kept meat. In this room Henry'd set himself up a small
bar, complete with a tap for his beer and a keg, which he replaced every two
weeks or so, Henry making the journey into that room with an empty glass and
returning with a full one four, five times during the average evening, not
counting the beer at breakfast with Huevos Ranchos on Saturdays, and the other
beers at odd times. Self thought damn,
look at this guy go, watching Henry stolidly down glass after glass, he wrote
to Mark the man has a fucking keg of beer of beer around the house, what do you
think, and Mark wrote back that he was making it up, and self, on the phone to
Mark, said swear to God, man, Louisiana is a trip, the whole culture here is
about Jesus and liquor, hard to know where one ends and the other begins, you
know? When, after getting home, he'd mentioned it to Dad, Dad had reddened a
little bit and said that Henry was going to get into trouble if he kept that
up. It was curious for self that Dad
reddened ‑ it was always like that when he brought up Henry around Dad, it was
like Dad somehow felt responsible for him, and it was also like Henry was a bit
of an embarrassment.
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