High Lonesome

The Agony of T. Bandini

TIGER BANDINI WAS A SHORT SORT OF PROWLING FELLOW WITH plump red lips and black ashy cheeks. He came from sports people but even to other hard-bitten fans he was over the line. He knew intimately about all the quick and larger hitters in American football. Above all he liked the linebackers and other violent crushers. He worshiped the violent crush. His eyes would close as if in a dream when he talked about Lawrence Taylor, for instance. He would begin screaming and white liquid would form at the corners of his lips. Giants fans in the bars who had begun in agreement with him would edge away and huddle together to avoid him. But Bandini was in a zone of screaming delight and was not conscious of this. One day after a Giants game on the television he went into a tirade of celebration and lost consciousness. They let him lie there on the floor, and in a few minutes he was back up on the bar, his eyes gone to slits and a vicious grin wrapped around another whiskey. He was whispering, “Taylor. Taylor.” He had been there since morning and when he left he got in his car and killed another man in a bad head-on accident.

He was forbidden a driver’s license in perpetuity by the judge. His family had struggled in measures grievous to them to keep Bandini out of prison and Bandini advised himself that he could no longer exist in his own town in upper New York state under the burden of shame and guilt.

Before his college experience was interrupted by the accident Bandini had met a pair of Southern boys who were crazed for the work of William Faulkner, and even more crazed as their homesickness grew. They could quote long passages from Faulkner that sounded to Bandini like a black preacher schooled on an enormous dictionary. Bandini sided with blacks, especially now that he was in disgrace and felt shunned. The Southern boys, like Faulkner, had elaborate reasons for doing almost anything. Bandini was impressed by this. He felt he was in the world of pain and ruin now after the wreck, but he saw there were elaborate reasons for it, and he relished this, as he drank only beer now at the end of the bar, only sometimes shouting. Ruin talked to him.

For instance, their college was not a very good college and was even falling apart physically. The buildings were erected by inferior contractors supported by the New York Mafia. Around the campus, interior and exterior walls fell down in chalky gravel that the students walked over daily. Sections of ceiling were apt to drop out, especially after a big snow or rain. Bandini liked to expatiate on the complexities of this in a patient beered-up review of the history of the New York Mafia. The Southern boys agreed nothing worthy was as plain as it seemed. The only worthy subjects were coiled up and crossed like nylon fishing line. Like them, Bandini began to speak much of destiny and twists of fate. This comforted him. Much was inevitable and bound to the blind dice-thrower fate. Fishing line left overnight would coil of its own.

So he thought it was in the dice and natural that he wind up way down south in a rental home in the precincts of the great author Faulkner himself. The town was storied and cozy, filled with shady lanes under great oaks. Around even his poor house in the student section was a bank of weeping willows.

One night, uncommonly drunk on Jägermeister, Bandini fell into them. It was midmorning when he awoke in a dream of green wigwam. A skinny cat came in there with him. Bandini took off all his stinking clothes, picked up the cat, and began weeping. This seemed a sad and wonderful place in here. He cursed the pavement and steel outside and did not come out of the trees until evening, when the cat began mewing loudly. The animal continued mewing in the house but he had got too drunk all over again on a pint of sloe gin thrown out of a car into the willows and did not understand what it wanted since he hardly ever ate himself. He looked at the creature and passed out on his nasty fluorescent sofa.

In the night he woke up the cat was still calling out and he recognized what it wanted because now he was hungry too. He put the cat in his overcoat pocket and walked a mile and a half to Kroger’s intending to provide a feast for the both of them and pushing the cat down by the shoulders. It scratched and hurt Bandini’s hand gravely but he staggered on. His cheeks were blown and red, and were like somebody had thrown a full ashtray on them.

Bandini had forgot his wallet, and he was far, far from his resources, a cold desert away it seemed. So in the lonesome store with scant personnel he put his free hand down into the aquarium and shoplifted two great lobsters and set them in the other pocket. Now he was truly fastened in by the hands on both sides and he went out the front electric door with a rictus of his big red mouth and some kind of song it might have seemed to the policeman, bored in a car. He got far out in the lot before he could truly whimper. The night manager came out and the policeman swung toward Bandini in his vehicle but Bandini saw this and scampered like a goat-fiend over the hill behind a branch bank and into the thorns, dead wortvine, and minor gullies where only the most wretched of animals went, and down closer to another road he stumbled on yet another bottle with half its liquor, so he secured the lobsters and drank, then he stayed to the backyards and overcame the trifling fences of the middle-aged and wifeworn, where had they shined a light on him they would have seen a man near vomitous with joy.

Tiger Bandini had got new lungs and legs off the boon of drink and he was again that twisting shifty dodger who had almost made the team nine years ago in the town close to the Canadian line. He came out of an alley into the town square free of the police, crafty and game, rid of the pain in his hands, which failed against the found whiskey. He tossed the bottle into a grate and saw in the cold moon before him the courthouse statue of the lone Confederate looking curiously southward. He became infatuated right off and with great conviction he emancipated the cat and lobsters, then began climbing the ten feet of pedestal and statue. He did not see the cat remain in the gutter only a short time before it ran at both lobsters huddled and alien there.

Bandini had a free wide heart for the vanquished. He scaled toward the man, all fours engaged, in an act of hunching and embracing. The policeman had driven up to witness this remarkable love, as Bandini almost reached the boots of the defeated. The policeman heard the man cry out like a thing impaled and then it was too ugly for him to watch anymore. The odor of rank sea and a low hissing brought the officer to kneel with his light. Above him, Bandini was going nowhere.

In jail Bandini was given the drunk tank where Cruthers, a lean black man, squatted. Cruthers was a police informer and chauffeur for a town writer who specialized in the burden of history.

Cruthers had twelve or fourteen DUIs. He claimed to be a sergeant in the Vietnam conflict who carried about an M-60, his sweet big baby, and mowed down hundreds. He slept in a tree and went native, a lizard of death from above, abandoned to independent slaughter by an army who did not love it enough and did not have the hair.

Cruthers would drive the writer to far parts, even New York, where the writer would introduce him to his cronies as the burden of history. Late at night with enough whiskey the writer and Cruthers would listen to Sinatra and Presley on a small cassette player and began weeping over the Vietnam dead and the Confederate dead, and, appropriate to the writer’s novel, the Korean dead. When Sinatra sang, it was the dead of World War II.

The lobsters and cat and scaling of the soldier were precious to the writer and Bandini was in solid at the writer’s campus bungalow. He read up on Bruce Catton and could account for the Northern agony, better and better, when the topic moved over to Those Who Fell once Elvis sang his medley of “Dixie” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” with the highly sincere Las Vegas band behind him.

Bandini insisted Cruthers move in with him and share his lot and the few hundred a month he got from his parents to stay out of New York. In fact he rather kidnapped Cruthers from the writer. But this was all right, since the writer was growing tired of Cruthers a little. Lately he had begun running the car out of gas and leaving it in mean places where crack fiends prowled and respected nothing. Also there was the problem of Cruthers always being in jail to be bailed out. Some money had disappeared too.

Bandini filled up the old shabby yellow house with history books. He was studying to be a student in the future, but this could wait. Through the writer he was let in to practice sessions of the football team, and he watched from the sidelines for hours, memorizing the players, especially the swift monstrous crushers. The coaches did not know what to make of the screaming little man with the New York accent who seemed to know and hate the weaknesses of individual players even more than they did. He used the word pussy a great deal. Soon he was asked to quiet down or leave. But he seemed to think of himself as a man with true work and vicious responsibility. Bandini knew that college players were semipro recruits only tenuously connected to the university. Half of them were not on familiar terms with the phrase alma mater. Bandini loved this. He wanted to think of the boys as pure cruising crushing meat, a kind of express ham. He was partial as always to the blacks, who he thought of as bursting out of their little nasty nowheres into the howling arenas of the world in the manner of Spartacus. This was their only shot and Bandini worshiped this wild simplicity.

The first time I saw Bandini in public trouble was after a game our team had lost in November when it was first turning chilly. Twilight was coming on and we filed out under the end zone stands. In the end zone we had a sort of rowdy club made up of professors and artists. It was fun seeing the touchdowns and murderous defensive plays from just a few feet away. Bandini sat with us and always brought Cruthers to the games with him. Without cease he would yell insults at the players, naming them, when he saw an error. He became hoarse doing this but never relented even when the game was far gone and the loyal were trickling out.

Under the stands a large professor who was also drunk had not cared for Bandini’s style and was beating Bandini on his head, really pounding him, as the man’s wife and Cruthers looked on. But Bandini would rise and rise again, crying out hoarsely. The wife seemed angrier than the man beating Bandini, actually. She had been personally insulted but the large professor was going about clobbering Bandini in a dutiful way, just socking him as if stamping the price on groceries. Cruthers was holding the man’s coat and smiling. Bandini would not fall and stay, and when he rose once, I heard his hoarse voice still going, hoarse in a whisper through his big bloody lips. He was still yelling about the game, the errors. He was barely acknowledging the professor, and I believe there was even a little smile on Bandini’s lips, a tolerant thing, as if this were a small social misunderstanding.

Months later, toward the end of my own serious drinking life, I was in a bar in an alley off the center of town. This bar prided itself on its roughneck and biker atmosphere in a town devoted to campus fashion in nearly everything. A crowd made way on the dance floor in front of the rock-abilly band. I thought at first it was Bandini dancing by himself. But he was doing his moves and staggering from having been hit. A man in a leatheroid long cowboy coat had struck him for defending Cruthers, who had been dancing with a white girl. Cruthers was still standing beside the girl with his arm around her shoulders sweated up from the dance. I noticed he was beholding it all with an expression of implacable scorn.

I really felt for Bandini, who went over to a booth by himself and sat there a long time, with an awful bruise rising on the side of his face. He was saying something over and over to the table but you couldn’t hear it for the band. I asked him if he was all right.

He lifted up his head and said: “I’m always all right.”

I heard that later in the night, however, Bandini had come out of the booth having shed his clothes. He had begun dancing and whirling. The boy who told me this commented that Bandini had an enormous penis, a thing almost not a part of him, it seemed. Nobody could believe it, and the band quit. Bandini lifted his penis and shook it all around at everybody, baiting each and every one, as it was quiet now.

“You can’t hurt me. Nothing you can do. You can’t hurt me.”

They were astounded but nobody seemed to mind that much. Bandini was in bad luck, however. There were two cops at the door and they broke through and hauled off Tiger Bandini, who still proclaimed himself hurt-proof. One drunk woman dancer began crying and saying what an awful thing that was, that it was too much like Jesus and it was a terrible, terrible thing to witness. She was hysterical.

I visited Bandini and Cruthers several times that year. I was running out of friends to drink with and it seemed that my worst anguish over a drink came on Sunday evenings when all the liquor was gone and the stores were shut. I think Bandini and Cruthers were moderating their drinking somewhat now after the incident at the bar. Cruthers I’d guess was simply a vast consumer and not strictly alcoholic. He simply drank whenever it was provided and you never saw him begging for a beer. He was a seasoned blithe leech and the campus provided him with a perennial supply of white liberal donors. He had a certain style and I never saw him thank anybody for a drink they had bought him. Bandini always seemed to have a few cold beers or the good part of a bottle left on Sunday nights.

The last night I visited he had two whole bottles and half a case of Heineken. It was his birthday and they had had a party yesterday, he said.

After three drinks I could not get a lift, only the poisoned flat feeling. I told Bandini I thought I was alcoholic. This made him very angry, not at me but at the idea.

“You are not!” he insisted. “Don’t take the cheap way out. Nobody is really … anything. Everybody is just a collision.”

I wondered where he had got that. Around the room, all over the sofa and the bed, were books of history. I noticed markers were in all of them just a few pages deep. He seemed to be reading many at once instead of one at a time.

I was over there hours talking history, football, and great art. I started talking about women but that stopped everything for a while. There was a long pause during which I drank very rapidly and finally felt a little. Bandini had nothing to say about women. He looked at me vacantly. Cruthers said he liked sleeping with a fat woman when it came winter. He said he had children about who were pretty. Bandini was flat to this too.

I recalled then I had never seen Bandini with a woman. He was not gay, but I had never even seen him in conversation with a woman.

But he was getting emotional now, well into the good whiskey along with Cruthers, who seemed to be getting sadder.

Bandini put a tape of the soundtrack to the movie Platoon in a small player and a trumpet began crying out.

The two of them were moving into something and I’ll never forget it. Cruthers leaned against the window, and outside, the cat that Bandini had saved sat poised like a monitor on the other side of the screen with an orange moon behind it. They listened intently to the soundtrack and I felt to say anything would be like speaking aloud in church. Cruthers got to shuffling and became moodier and distant. Bandini raised his head and said to Cruthers softly, “Tell it all.”

The mood had gotten almost holy and eerie.

Cruthers began talking.

“I could sleep and make myself little but I always woke up the second anything anybody in range. I could smell them, my nose wake me up. I was on that tree crotch and had me a good limb with my honey and I start fucking her. They come over a hill five black pajamas in a row across like they was hunting rabbits. I blow all they heads off. Then I let myself down and each and every one I stomp they balls. But one of them a teenage girl just the top of her head blown back. I commence giving it to her mouth when I hold her up by the shoulders. That was the best I ever had.”

The room was as quiet as a tomb. Only Cruthers’s voice was going and the cat never moved. This must have been going on a long time. Cruthers finished the story and went in the kitchen to make himself another drink. There were going to be a lot more stories.

I looked down to Bandini and he was staring at the floor with a smile. His eyes were wet and he was in a hypnotic region.

“Feel the turning and the twistings of all that, how Cruthers got there and the dispossessed without any mission but this rendezvous with a boy from Water Valley, Mississippi, and the gun he sleeps with in a tree, making love to it sixteen thousand miles from home. Nothing could stop it, nothing.”

I was stunned by the new deep voice of Bandini, and this whole language.

When I looked at him again I believe he had forgotten I was in the room. He smiled just slightly and I could see how deeply in love he was.