One to Count Cadence

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 mannequin's head. But when Linda Charles walked out to sing, long blond hair, real hair instead of a wig, sweeping down and back across her white shoulders, slim, firm legs swinging beneath a simple green silk sheath, a voice in the club, dim behind Morning, said in drunken awe, "My God, that's no man." Linda Charles smiled a woman's smile, enchanted with flattery, at the voice. Then she clapped her hands, stomped a delicate foot, and roared into a blues arrangement of "Saint James Infirmary" in a fine husky contralto. The green high heel behind her, her hands clasped in front, then a passionate shake of the head would send the blond hair out of her face in a shining ripple down across her round shoulders.

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."

"Morning out in the morning," he chanted. "Tell my brethren I'll be come 'fore daylight charms their ruddy cheeks. You're gonna make a wonderful junior executive, Jack, you know that?"

"Joe, boy, what's gone wrong?" Jack asked again, his voice and face soft in professional concern. He fooled a drunk Morning.

So Morning tried to answer him as he lay back among the twisted, dirty sheets, looking vacantly up at the poster of an intent Lenin pasted on the low ceiling, but after a moment when he looked over at Jack's bored, dumb face, he snorted, then said with a smile, "Jack, baby, let's talk about you. I mean what's wrong with you, son? I know how you acted when them farm boys corn-holed you, I remember that, but they told me you loved it, and wouldn't let them stop. And your roommate been looking kinda peaked lately…"

"You son of a bitch," Jack said, standing up. "You bastard, I should have killed you that night."

"That's right, bugger, 'cause you sure as hell can't do it now. They fucked the guts out of you that night."

Jack sought the dirtiest curse he could think of: "You damned Communist."

Morning laughed and laughed, wild, happy roars that drove Jack from the room, across the basement, and up the stairs, and might still drive him wherever he may be. "Better Commie than queer, Jackshit." He laughed until in that quickly, for him, vanishing point between pleasure and pain, he found tears falling on his dirty hands, sobs raw in his throat, and a great lonely hole growing inside, the hole he drank into all the night long.

The next morning he felt, as he always did when chance laid him open to the world's fateful arrows and errors, that not only his civil, but even more his moral rights had been played with fast and loose by the minor officials of the various legalities he was subject to, fraternal, academic, municipal. In his drunken way he was going to demand redress, even if that redress would cost him in the same careless way: he was born to be a loser. Loser or not, though, he presented himself before the steps of the college administration building at eight o'clock in the morning, neatly dressed, shaved, clean, wearing the slacks, sweater, loafer uniform of his fellow men, and carrying a neatly lettered sign which said simply, as Morning said all his days, I PROTEST, meaning merely that he was protesting the world's treatment of him.

The administration had learned from other protests the best defense: they quietly, calmly ignored him in the way a father ignores his errant infant son. The administration was also in the process of ignoring four young Negroes who came each day with signs to protest the segregation rules of the college. The administration, adept at ignorance, also paid no mind to the eight or ten football players who appeared each morning at ten o'clock to formally spit on the Negroes who, if they blinked at this, were left curled in silent pain on the clean sidewalk, or dropped on the carefully clipped grass, or stretched over a neat hedge. But this was to be a different morning.

Just as the first Negro fell, the tall lean hungry end from north Alabama who had hit him found himself falling as Joe Morning landed square with both feet in the middle of his back. Morning became all feet and elbows, his frenzy the madness of righteousness, his strength that of surprise and holy anger, and the infidels fell about him in waves, and if he could have them away from his ribs, he might have stood them off until sweet darkness. As it was, he made them forfeit such an unholy price for his defeat that they left the other three Negroes alone that day, and from that day let the Negroes protest in peace.

So for the second time in three days, Morning woke beaten and bleeding slightly on that thin mattress, which still held the stink of his waste, bound and chained again, though on his back this time. Ah, even the fuzz is wearing thin, growing soft, he thought as he woke, and smiled, then touched his tongue to the stiff stitches in his split lip. Holy rage had eased the bitterness. He felt as clean as the lamb, washed in his own blood, but clean nonetheless, and he sang happy songs until he was released at five.

A civil-rights organization had bailed him out, and a sweet-faced, collegiate-looking cat from Cornell thanked him for his zeal and love, but chided him for resorting to violence, then bought him a beer. Partly because he wanted to throw it at his mother, partly because he needed a place to rest, but mostly because he was enchanted by this soft-spoken chocolate cat with a touch of a Yankee twang, Morning moved with the Negro into a small room off the war room in the basement of a Negro church. "Basements again," Morning said, "Always the lower depths for me," with laughter. He refused at first to even allow that non-violence had any positive possibilities; his plan was to bring the bluebellies back down the Mississippi, then let them march dreadfully to the sea, burning crops of white men in their wake. But Richard, the Negro, refused even to allow Morning to sing with them until he at least intellectually acknowledged that non-violence was the way, for now. So Morning did, mentally preparing himself for being spat upon and called niggerlover, but Richard sent him to a man in East St. Louis who then sent Morning and his guitar and his discontent off with a fund-raising group around Mid-Western and Western college campuses. So Morning sang with a Southern accent, and worked, and lived off checks sent secretly by his father instead of taking expenses from the organization, and he worked well except for a few lost weekends, or week days, depending on his moods. It was on one of these dark times, wandering about hilly San Francisco in the fog, that he stepped into the nightclub where sang the man called Linda Charles, and first acknowledged his fear.

But he forgot, as best as Joe Morning ever forgot anything, during the heat of the next summer. He marched in Birmingham, sat-in in Tampa, sang all over the Southland, sang about freedom, and all the while bound by his love for violence, and every step closely watched by Richard. He had to grab Morning in Tampa when a skinny deputy spit his chaw on them, but he couldn't have held Morning alone. Morning held part of himself, and he made it through the summer.

In the fall he drifted to Phoenix with a chick he had worked with, and he lived off her and his guitar until January, then went back to the fund-raising scene. In San Francisco he stayed away from the club where he had seen the shimmering vision of Linda Charles, stayed away until he became conscious of his absence, then he went, sober, sweating, but she wasn't playing there. Relieved, he went in to exorcise her (him), and found himself enjoying the show. It was funny, and did poke at the hypocrisy of middle-class America. And professional too, said the guy at the next table who said, and who looked the part, that he had just retired as a 49er defensive lineman. "These guys aren't queer. They're just actors trying to make a living. That one guy there," he said, pointing to a slim stripper, "has got six kids out in San Mateo." After the show he and Morning went down to Chinatown, drinking together until the ham-handed bear of a bastard made a clumsy pass at him. Morning swung on him, but the guy lowered his head, and Morning broke his hand. He ran like the wind, pulling over barstools behind him, and escaped with his life and virtue intact.

The old doctor who set the bones that night gave Morning a long lecture on the vices of the world. "The devil wears many faces, son, many masks. Be forever on guard. Tempt him not for his strength is the strength of ten men," he said, forming the cast with white hands connected to thin arms on which all the veins had collapsed from shooting. "Tempt him not. That will be twenty-seven fifty," he said, but Morning ran out of the emergency room, shouting, "The devil wears many masks, old man," diabolical laughter falling behind him as he ran. (Six months later he mailed a check to the old doctor, but the old doctor mailed it right back with a short note, "Son, I know what the devil costs. You'll need this more than I.")

"Why do things always happen to me?" Morning asked Richard the next summer. "Why me?" and Richard answered, "They happen to all of us, man, so just stay cool." But coolness wasn't Morning's long suit, so Richard refused to let him demonstrate. Morning, in anger, moved to a more militant organization, and on the first sit-in of the summer at a dime-store lunch counter in Birmingham, he laid low a nineteen-year-old kid who only said Pass the salt, niggerlover. Then the kid's buddies moved in, and Morning left the civil-rights movement the same way he entered, swinging and kicking for holy hell.

Charged with felonious assault, Morning faced one to three years, but his mother, faithful Southern mother, had a cousin (in the South one has cousins everywhere) who shot pool with the judge. So instead of three years, he was exiled from Alabama, in effect. The charges were indefinitely postponed, but the case would be reopened if he crossed into Alabama to demonstrate for anything ever.

The anger he held for the judge's sentencing, he held until he was outside. Once again he walked away from his mother without a word, stopped long enough for his guitar and a flight bag, then, anger still his only impulse, he walked from downtown, out 3rd, all the way to the city limits before he stuck out his thumb pointed toward Phoenix. But anger doesn't lend itself to hitching rides: the action is too slow, the long waits while asphalt puffs in the sun and the sparse shade of a jackpine protects neither man nor angry beast against the hot, dusty winds trailing semi's. The time after midnight, which may be the witching hour but ain't the hitching hour, he stood at lonely crossroads, stood for hours that never end, then ran from side to side from road to road at the call of the headlights booming up through East Texas piney woods, hoping only for a ride to anywhere, and again the semi's roaring past like fast freights. Then the afternoon sun like lava on rocky West Texas hills and a man makes the only shade there is, fatigue and dust and sunburn like a mask eating his face, until finally he hasn't even a damn for the arrogant cars hissing past, slinging gravel at his hot feet. Then Phoenix rising in the heat waves as he watched from the back of a cotton-picker truck filled with Mexicans, and he was ready to lay his burden down.

Four cold beers at his old girl's place, then he fell into his first long sleep. He slept for days, thirteen to be exact, in her bed, rising only to relieve himself or swill a glass of tepid water. But not so much sleeping, he said, but dreaming of sleep and dreams. He ran dreams like movies with intermissions for a leak, then right back to the film – war, honor, love, the past, the future – running until it seemed his brain could contain no more images, yet still going on like a bad Italian movie. Frightened, the girl called a doctor who merely sedated Morning into real sleep for another twelve hours, then told the girl to throw a glass of cold water into his face the next morning. He came up angry again, and was all right.

Back to the guitar and the bottle for a couple of months, then the music became enough. He sang professionally now, four thirty-minute sets six nights a week in a small sometimes coffee house sometimes bar, Harps on the Willows. He had never been better. More faithful to the box he played than the one he slept with, he barely noticed when she drove her small sports car back to Boston. But people were noticing him, and Morning never denied liking that. He played student gatherings on off-nights, then an occasional party at an English professor's house. He grew a beard to go with his long hair, and was soon a minor rage among new rich, pseudo liberal, culture vultures in Phoenix, even out in simple, suburban Scottsdale, and there he met his fear face to mask, Linda Charles.

The party was at a large, rambling house on three acres of clipped, watered grass. It was an engineer's house, filled with electrical gadgets, a button to flush, a button to roll off a neat amount of paper, ice makers, drink makers, and wired from asshole to elbow with sweet stereo. The floors were laid in rugs as thick as bear skin, and peopled with people fighting the way they made their money, the hesitantly liberal, the casual un-Godly who occasionally would quietly say "fuck" for special emphasis and quietly slap a fist into the other hand, and the women very careful not to blush. Morning came here, his credentials not much better than these who received him, came in a buckskin shirt stained with someone else's sweat, scuffed cowboy boots, and faded, frayed Levi's. He sang the soft protests, a few old English ballads (he could make me cry with even old hat "Barbara Allen"), then some wild bawdy Scotch songs, some popular comic snatches, then the dirtiest Irish roar he knew, and came on in the finale leading the group in "We Shall Overcome" like an intellectual cheerleader. He knew his audience. After him came the Twist as the crew-cuts and drizzle-heads paired off. He worked two sets, then a little mixing with the crowd, a few casual references to the Movement, and a crisp fifty from the hostess whom he had screwed in the English professor's bathroom four times before she hired him. Out here, though, he made gentle verbal passes at all the pretty women, flowers caught in plastic paperweights, but he never followed them through. He knew his audience.

But this particular night the Movement was moved out by a wonderful bit of risqué humor and singing by the hostess' personal friend, the famous female impersonator, one Linda Charles.

He remembered her (he couldn't keep himself from thinking her instead of him) and saw her across the room, prim in a high-collared sleeveless black dress, sitting on a white sofa, alone because the men were afraid; and the women, either envious or unconcerned, stayed away too. The hostess led Morning across to her, introduced them, then fled. Morning shook her hand, trying not to examine it for any trace of male hardness, but finding none in spite of his failure. She said hello very softly, offered the seat next to her with a slim white arm. Morning hesitated, but she said, "Oh, hell, sit down. I may have balls but I don't bite." She laughed with such a sense of her own vanity and foolishness, such an ease, that Morning did sit, feeling it would be square not to, sat in the seat next to her, and all that was to come, with open innocent eyes.

"You're pretty good," she said, "a professional, shall we say, phony. You didn't get those hands as a passive resister, jack."

"I beg your pardon," he answered, stupidly, not knowing what to say.

"I beg your pardon," she mocked, tilting her head with a musical hit to her voice. "You are a straight arrow square, aren't you?"

"I just didn't know what you meant."

"You're as much a fake as I am. Those old clothes, sweat stains, scuffs, and holes. I'll bet you bathe every day and would rather die than wear dirty shorts. Your beard's too neatly trimmed, too," she said, but smiled quietly as if they were conspirators in the same plot. "You're obviously as hip as Richard Nixon, but you're good enough to fool these johns out here. Your father is probably an accountant and your mother sings in a church choir, and that's where you learned to sing, in a damned church choir."

"Yeah," he answered, "you're right, but you've been talking to old bumble butt about me," he said, pointing a thumb at the hostess.

"Need to know what my competition is up to."

"You, too?" Morning said, amazement clear on his face.

"She's the kind of broad who says, 'I want to experience everything in this world at least once before I die,' never knowing she was stillborn. Of course me too. What do you think I'm doing here? Don't be square forever."

"Well, I'm learning every minute," Morning said, lighting her cigarette.

"Really," she said, leaning back on the couch and raising a delicate eyebrow behind a stream of smoke. "Then be a good boy and run get me a drink."

Morning started to rise, then slouched back and said, "Screw you, jack," but said it with a grin.

"Save your strength for bumble butt," Linda said, smiling too. "I guess you are learning. Let's go back to Phoenix and I'll buy you a real drink to kill the taste of this cheap punch bumble butt calls booze."

Morning had just noticed fifteen or twenty heads turned in his direction, heads which turned back when he faced them, trying to conceal looks and smirks puckered in oatmeal faces. "What?" he said, turning back to Linda.

"Don't sweat it. If you read your Kinsey, or Ellis, or whoever, you know that true transvestites aren't queer. I got problems, but not that one, man." She spoke without hardness, without pushing, and a small verticle line pinched between her wide green eyes made her look discriminated against, told of being mistaken by narrow minds. "Besides," she continued, a sad touch of a grin at her mouth, "it will be good paper for you. Raise your fee from what, fifty, to one bill for sure."

"For sure," he said. "Let's split."

"I know I'm lovely, but I'm not built that way, really," she said, white teeth holding her lower lip off a smile.

Morning laughed, then as he stood, he involuntarily offered his hand. She looked at it, her head cocked to the side like a puzzled puppy, he looked at it, then they chuckled together.

"That's all right," she said. "Sometimes I forget too." She rose without his help, then walked toward the door, movements neat, trim, fluid, hip motion not exaggerated but terribly feminine.

The son of a bitch practices, Morning thought, Jesus.

Outside she offered to let him drive her XK-E. When he whistled at the metallic blue car gleaming under the desert moon, she said, "There are lots of burly chaps who are quite happy to pay a ten buck minimum to see some crazy cat in drag. Plus my mother left me about two hundred fifty thousand dollars, bless her drunken hide."

As he drove, Morning told her about his fight with the huge queer in San Francisco.

"What a flaming queen he is, honey. He makes Mardi Gras every year so he can go in drag. What a riot. Smokey the Bear in hose and heels. Too much," she said.

They stopped at a quiet expensive lounge and drank at the leather covered bar for several hours, sipping slow Scotches, each seeming to wait for the other to get drunk. They discovered a mutual affection for Faulkner, then Sartre and Gide, particularly The Counterfeiters, then with wild laughter discovered that they were members in bad standing of the same national fraternity.

"I've got this friend," Morning said, thinking of Jack, "who'd love to meet you." He laughed, then told her the long story about Jack.

When Linda drove him home, they were laughing together like old buddies who had forgiven each other in advance, and when she drove away, her exhausts hammering the pavement as exhausts will, Morning chuckled with great relief. He had braved the darkness in its most attractive shape, for if she was nothing else, Linda Charles was a lovely woman with a wide handsome mouth and a clean laugh and the carriage and poise a woman needs, plus that touch of sad melodrama women break hearts with. And Morning had braved it, conquered it, and tonight he owned the world. He slept without dreams, woke without guilt, then in the middle of a yawn, remembered that he had left his guitar in Scottsdale.

He didn't see Linda again for nearly a week, and then he didn't talk to her. She came in the Harps with a group of white waving hands and flitting voices. Morning was in the middle of a set, and she nodded to him, then turned up her nose at her friends, laughing. Another time she came in alone, seemingly depressed, so Morning had a drink with her between sets. He made a few bad jokes which seemed to cheer her up, not from mirth, but from the effort. Then she came by his apartment one afternoon, her hair up, wearing a flashy red dress, looking like an expensive whore, and asked him to have a drink or two with her before he went to work. They went to the same lounge as the first night, sat at the back of the bar, and swilled Scotches like sailors. Within the hour they were quite drunk.

"You know," Morning said, grinning, "That's the only thing you do like a man."

"What's that?" She didn't seem worried that she did anything like a man.

"Drink. That's all. You even move like a woman. Christ. Sometimes I wonder if you're not a chick with a strange hang-up who likes to say she's a man."

"No, man," she said. "You ought to pay one month's hormone bill, then you'd know I'm a man. But I know what you mean. Maybe I should've been a woman. Shit, I even had a breast tumor removed. They cut my little bitty nipple right out. But this way… Crap, I can't lift anything heavier than a beer glass, I can't go out in the sunlight, can't even get drunk more than once or twice a month or my face starts getting hard." She paused, circling the water ring on the bar with a perfectly done fingernail, then looked up and smiled a smile which, if it had come from a woman, would have broken a man's heart. "Drag is a drag, man, more often than not."

Morning, a drunk man, an indiscriminate man, a man more frightened than he knew, let his heart be touched. "Jesus Christ, man, what is a guy like you doing in a bag like this."

"Good as any other in this stupid fucking world," she answered, smiling slightly. "Good as any."

"Yeah, guess so," he said, then laughed. "Shit, yes."

They drank silently for a few minutes, acknowledging each other's sadness, but soon were scolding the darkened air with words again.

Later she began talking about herself, saying, "And as long as I'm careful about choosing my friends, neither too straight, nor too gay, I live the good life. The only thing," she said, pausing, then looking directly into Morning's eyes, "The only thing is that this is a dead-end bag. I've found a couple of chicks who thought they could make the permanent scene with me, but both of them finally asked me to drop out of drag, and I wouldn't. Sometimes I even think about a family, oddly enough, but then I wonder what would happen if a kid of mine found out about me. I'm foul enough; no need to pass it on. I get enough ass off latent dikes; I'm beautiful; I'm happy." She smiled, happiness professionally touched with sad eyes.

"That's what counts, man," Morning said.

They drank, talked some more, then Morning realized that it was past time for his first set. Too drunk to sing, he called his boss, who said, I know your ass is downtown drunk with that naming queen of a bastard, and Morning said, My ass is here, yours is there, shove my guitar up it and smile. Thus went his job.

When he went back to his stool, he found a slick middle-aged man who fancied himself a swinger sitting there, putting a big play out for Linda. Morning sat on the other side of her.

"Kansas City, Kansas," the traveling man was saying. "Sales. Regional director. Electronic bookkeeping equipment." He then thrust out a hand at Morning, an aggressive hand, saying, "Howard Tingle. Electricity in that hand, boy," then laughed, and squeezed Morning's hand.

Morning winced in mock pain, saying, "Hey, cat, lay off the hand, huh?"

"Young fella like you ought to keep in shape, boy," he said, slapping his gut. "Hard as a rock, all the way down," he smirked. "Handball twice a week at home. Swim in motels on the road, but not always in the pool." He laughed again. "You young kids shouldn't let yourselves go like that."

"Yeah, man, I'll take up toilet tilting tomorrow," Morning said, but the salesman had already turned to Linda, whispering in her ear.

She laughed, half-turned her head to wink at Morning, then seductively poked the john in the ribs. She led him on for nearly an hour, matching Morning drink to drink. The three of them moved to another bar, a place where Linda and the salesman could dance and cuddle in a booth. The salesman tried to kiss her on the dance floor, but Linda leaned back, coy as a high school girl, and shook a finger at him. Morning had to grin drunkenly at himself. After one song, she swept by the table for her purse, then pranced, hips thumping under the tight red satin, to the rest room, whispering over her shoulder to the salesman, "Now don't you be a bad boy and try to peek."

"Boy, oh boy, that is some woman," he said, sitting across from Morning. Sweat beaded his forehead and he wiped at it with a cheap handkerchief, his face slack with whiskey. "Say, I'm not messing anything up for you, huh? Hate to do that," he chortled, unbuttoning the blue collegiate blazer he affected.

"Not a thing, man."

"God, she's some broad."

"She'll show you things you never dreamed of, man."

"I'll show her something she's always dreamed of," he said, patting the lump in his crotch.

"Go, baby, go."

Even in the dim light from the jukebox Morning could see the heavy coat of fresh lipstick gleaming like a wound on Linda's mouth as she walked back to the table, a smile of anticipation curving across her face.

"Let's dance," she commanded.

They swayed close, slowly, and Morning saw Linda place a perfect lip print on the salesman's rolled oxford collar, then the salesman was trying for her mouth again. She avoided him, laughing, teasing, until the end of the song when she turned away then quickly spun back, grabbed the salesman's face, and kissed him long and hard, the muscles of her neck rippling like her tongue in his mouth, but she pulled away before he could raise his startled arms, and ran giggling back to the table. Morning didn't answer her grin; he turned his face, then ashamed, turned back with a slight smile.

The salesman stayed on the dance floor, stunned as if the red on his mouth came from a fist, but then he came at the table, lust ugly on his face. He cornered Linda like a dog after a bitch, clung to her mouth as if receiving life itself from her, his hands clutching at her arms, then running like crabs at her legs, up the smooth sand-colored hose, toward the the dark crevice. Morning saw what was coming, so he ran to the rest room.

The water gushing in the sink as he washed his face didn't cover the angry gasp, the curse, the mocking laughter, the knifing "what did you catch hold of there, john," the quick stumbling across the dance floor, the hand stabbing at the door knob.

But the salesman's face wasn't angry, just sadly confused, when he said to Morning, "She's a goddamned man. Did you know that? A fucking man." His shaking fingers gripped Morning's denim jacket. "A man. Did you know that?"

"That's okay, man," Morning said, pity twisting to contempt on his face, "I'm a woman."

The anger needed a second to travel from the salesman's tired, drunk brain to his face, and then another to transfer to his arm. But the room was narrow, and his wild swing ended against the metal towel container, but his words got through:

"You fucking queer bastard."

Morning's knee and fist moved at the same instant; the knee, faster, found soft purchase first; the knuckles swept a red trail across the salesman's blanched forehead. He fell back on the white toilet, his face framed by the pure white wall: his smeared, benumbed, moaning mouth; his eyes clenched as tight as his fist had been; the lip print perfect on his white shirt, gleaming like a deliberate clue left by a clever, romantic cat burglar at the scene of his crimes. Vomit bubbled at his shamed mouth as he hiccupped, then reeling to the side, he retched into the cavern of the urinal.

Blind madness and rage hit Morning, and without thought, he slammed his fist against the side of the salesman's face and neck, five, six, maybe seven times. His head rattled against the inside of the urinal like a marble in a cup, but wouldn't bounce out, and when Morning left, he still moaned into the blood, piss, and whiskey; a small moan, no louder than the trickle of water dripping down the drain of the urinal, but it had the same determined futile patience of the trickle, determined to wash the waste of man away, and the same futility too.

Linda had the Jag running when Morning walked outside. She had scrubbed the smeared make-up from her face and let her hair down. She had good clear skin under the cosmetic mask, and under the street lights she could have passed for a sixteen-year-old virgin.

"Bad?" she asked.

"Bad," he said.

"Then maybe we should take a quick run up to Tahoe. I've got a place where we can lay up for a while. You have anything you can't leave?" Without seeming to drive fast, she took the car quickly down to Indian School Road, then up on the Black Canyon Highway, north toward Flagstaff. "You have anything you can't leave?" she asked again as she laid the car out up the expressway.

A guitar, some records, a few books, but the landlord would hold them for back rent. "I don't have anything anywhere that I can't leave." He paused, then said, "Hey, don't pull, don't pull that kind of shit around me again."

She turned her face, clean, fresh, soft in the muted glow from the dash, and from her scrubbed pink mouth: "Why the fuck not?" The exhaust followed them in the silence, a trailing echo chasing its source.

"I don't know. It was a bad scene. That cat was a turd, but I didn't like beating up on him." He refused to look at her, but her hair brushed past his face as she tossed her head.

"Baby, remember that each time you laid one on him, you laid on a blow for freedom. When all the dumb shits like him are pounded into the sewers, then people like us can start to live, then everybody can live…" She went on for several miles, listing the sins of the American middle-class businessman, saying all the things Joe Morning had said so many times in the past two years. She found a bottle of Scotch under the seat and a stack of bennies in her purse, and she let him take the wheel at New River when they stopped for gas. By Flagstaff they were popped up and tight both, singing protests and laughing and crying. They shouted The Revolution is Coming to drunk Indians and sleepless Mexicans wandering the highway's edge. On a lark they detoured through Grand Canyon, whipping past complacent, sleeping campers. They stopped to stand in the moonlight over the South Rim, feeling on their high the smallness of this tiny scratch in the earth. Linda softly sang Joan Baez ballads, and an occasional echo would drift back up on the wind out of the heart of the canyon. As they walked back to the car, she stopped; stuck out her hand, and said, "Joe Morning, you are a good cat."

Morning took the hand, saying, "You too," but the thought whoever and whatever you are stuck in his throat.

They raced on across the desert, that night, the next day, across rock and brown earth, through receding heat mirages to the green shade and cool, cool blue of Tahoe.

Morning spent the first three or four days worrying about living in the cabin near Meeks Bay with Linda, but she showed little interest in his sex life; he relaxed. The days were easy, cool from the first cold dip in the lake until the last brandy after dinner. They both read and slept most of the time or lay in the mountain sun until the salesman's face faded from Morning's dreams. There was a party down the beach one night the second week, and Morning found himself quickly smothered in Scotch and women. He drank, he fucked, he kissed, it seemed, a thousand women that night, and the next day, sleeping off the drunk, he dreamed that one of the women had been Linda, and then it was the salesman, kissing him, and then Linda and the salesman were clawing at each others crotches, and Morning was angry, until they began tearing at his clothes… and he woke.

As he lifted his head off the bed, a sledge hammer crashed into his forehead. He reeled back, rolled off the bed, his eyes crossing and giggles tickling up his throat. Sitting on the floor, he giggled again, groaned, stood, then made a circling lunge toward the bathroom door, the bathroom between their bedrooms, the door he had always been so careful to lock, so careful to knock on, but this morning he slammed into it, thinking only of cold water splashing his hot, painful face.

Linda stood, unstartled, before the mirror, obviously carefully preparing her face for something. "Hello, baby," she said, smiling. "Come on in," she said.

But now it wasn't easy to think of her as Linda. She had tied her hair back with a blue velvet ribbon, and she had almost finished with her face, except for one small false eyelash which she still held expectantly in her hand. This made her face seem slightly unbalanced, but it was still a lovely woman's face, but only the face. Below ran a bare, somewhat thin, white hairless chest without even a budding titty to break the line. There was one male retarded mockery of a nipple, but a stretched diagonal scar supplanted the other. Linda's chest seemed to be winking conspiratorily at him, and Morning giggled again. And then his eyes dropped below the bare chest and the naked waist, and he laughed out loud. A huge throbbing erection cast its vote for some kind of masculinity, raised a one-armed salute to the world, as if to say, Whatever he is up there, I'm by God a man. Morning doubled with laughter.

"You mother-fucking straight son of a bitch, don't you laugh," Linda screamed, her voice more like a woman's than ever before. And Morning didn't pause. "Stop it!" she screamed again. "Stop it!" But Morning couldn't stop.

He laughed as if he hadn't for years. There was, no more than there naturally is, no malice in his mirth. He even expected Linda to join him, but she stomped her foot, shook her head as if it were weighted with a heavy witch doctor's mask, and screamed, "Stop it! I'll kill you! Stop it!" Then she slapped him. She slapped him with both hands, flying at him like a little dog, her fine mouth curled in hate. Morning stumbled out of the bathroom and fell back across his bed, still roaring, rolled off, and felt his head bounce off the night table, then heard the sea-like roar of oncoming unconsciousness. The last thing he remembered was a rather bony white foot with tiny red toenails swinging at his head, but he couldn't get his hand up to stop it.

Morning felt, though he couldn't think why, that he had been asleep for a long, long time, leaving his brain groggy and stupid with sleep, a troubled sleep too, a heavy bond holding him, sticky, smelling as sweet as taffy. Waking took time. More unconscious than alert, he rolled to his stomach, pushed up to his knees, then stood, and for the second time in two days, though he thought it the same day, he fell toward that bathroom door. Leaning heavily on the sink, he threw up a dribble of clear liquid, then he rinsed his mouth, drank, then immediately threw the cold water from stomach to sink. He rinsed his mouth again. Then he raised his head, not to look in the mirror, but merely to hold his head up for a change, and in the silvered glass was reflected the ghost, the face which haunted him into the Army, across the sea, his own face.

(We all see things we can't face at one time or another; even I once ran as Joe Morning ran from that image. Picture, if you can, a gargantuan draft horse ripped in half by lightning from a summer shower, then a boy that afternoon racing on a bareback pony to see the destruction and finding the front quarters and head moving and jerking and grunting, and his horse shying away in the mud, then the boy advancing with a thick live oak branch, afraid to run, for he had never known running, his code allowed no running room, stepping up to the heaving carcass and swinging his cudgel against the withers with that mad terror named courage. The carcass convulsed. A three-hundred pound sow backed out of the cavern she had gnawed into the rank flesh, entrails and lights draped from her shoulders, congealed blood and flesh dripping from her grunting mouth. A jaded sneer wrinkled her nose and she was ready to fight for her pounds of flesh. I ran; she followed me in spirit. My grandfather spoke of pigs rooting among the corpses between the trenches; I couldn't stand that.)

The visage in the mirror wasn't exactly Morning's. His neatly clipped beard was gone, and his face, it seemed, with it. Pancake foundation lay thick on his cheeks. An angry red slash gaped open in mockery of his mouth. Dark, blue-shadowed, lined, amazed eyes glared under drooping mink lashes. A long blond wig, sensuously mussed, hung to his shoulders. The hand that touched his face sported teardrop nails of blood red. His body became aware of the rustle of a white nylon nightgown, a cotton stuffed bra pinching his chest, his crotch feeling naked in panties, and stockings encasing his legs. Even the hair on his chest and legs had been shaved. He dried his face carefully, then walked about the cabin looking for Linda. Her things were still there, but she was gone. He did find seven color Polaroid pictures of himself in various stages of being dressed, but the eighth picture wasn't there. He looked among the empty sacks and boxes on the bedroom floor, but the picture wasn't there either. Price tags and cash receipts were though, and he calmly marveled at the price of perversion. Then he went to the kitchen and fixed breakfast.

After breakfast, he noticed that his lipstick was faded. He went to Linda's room and fixed it, then turned on the TV, opened a bottle of champagne, and drank a toast to himself: "Why not? Why the fuck not?"

"Well, why not?" I asked as dawn fled in the windows of the hotel, then I laughed.

"What are you laughing about?" he said. "It wasn't funny."

"Why not? You were drunk; drunks play games. Laugh and it ain't so serious; don't laugh and it's trouble," I said.

"I can't laugh about it. I'm still scared." He hung his head, all the way down to the table.

"Of being queer?"

"What else?"

"Oh, hell, come off it. You were used, taken, then you played a child's game coming down from trouble. That's all." I said.

"Three days ain't a game," he said. "Three days in drag."

"Three days, three months. It's all the same. If you were queer, or any queerer than the rest of us are naturally, you would have already fallen."

"You think I subconsciously knew that broad tonight was a Billy Boy, don't you?" he said into his folded arms.

"Christ, get off that shit. You want to be queer, jack, be queer. You want to be straight, be straight. But quit bugging the world about it." I stood up, rubbing my face.

"Always Krummel with the easy answer."

"It is easy. Just say what you want to do, then make yourself do it." I walked to the window. Manila Bay seemed filled with mud that morning.

"Maybe easy for you, but not easy for people with feeling, sensitive people."

"That's cute, boy. You're just too sensitive to live. Well, jump out the goddamn window. If you will excuse the metaphor, Morning, you are a pain in the ass sometimes."

"That's because that's the only place you got any feeling, fucker," he said, looking up. "You're the one who might as well be dead."

"Yeah, it's tough all over." I walked to the bathroom to shower, and when I came out, he was gone. "May God watch out for the innocents," I said to the empty room. I caught the next bus back to Angeles, knowing that the next time I saw Morning, he would be hating me again. I knew too much about him. But then I always had.