Like a Banana in the Sun

Moping around my house in white python boots and an orange, green, and gold paisley robe discarded to the Hospice Attic when someone's grandfather died, i realized i was mad. Pissed at Barry Hannah, mostly, but at all of my ex-lovers, too.

i'd been rationing Geronimo Rex for three weeks. Each afternoon i'd bike through my George Washington-y neighborhood to the "ghetto pool" a couple miles east of my house with the B.H. in my basket. The pool is always packed with 20 or 30 unchaperoned black kids and one or two white dads with tattoos or white moms with bushy underarms and their oblivious children, a few lifeguards, and an alligatory man who politely ogles from the edge the pool. My ex-swimming partner fit him into a general framework of weirdness he lables "Lynchian," which also applied to the pool's improbably European aura.

During our first summer, my ex and i would sneak to the pool every afternoon before i went to work. These decadent and womb-y afternoon floats were the quintessential mise-en-scene for the psychosexual intellidrama we'd ardently begun. Our incessant yammerings were softened by the blinding turquoise square he slowly towed me across and back until 2:30 or an early-afternoon thunderstorm forced our separation into the transitional spaces of the men's and women's changing rooms.

But then he saw a darkess, and then another, and then they were everywhere. Me he'd cast as a shrill glare. Finally, after a cataclysmic sequence of sad and confusing events, i pretty much sat shiva for his sorry ass. Caulked up the paths where two years of memories might sneak out of my head and into my more sympathetic regions, and began busily performing a sexless autonomy zone stocked with 4 jobs, 3 cats, 2 bars, and 1 bedroom in a foreign house. This was a serviceable plan, but i live on the outskirts of the South. The ghosts are always one step ahead of me.

i began reading Geronimo Rex and returning to the pool around the same time. Fleece seemed to me what my ex could have been if he wasn't more egomaniac than fragile genious, but he is, and so he is actually more like Harry Monroe, and by the end of the book i was hating him for it.

On my first day back to the pool i was indignant, but i was happy to be swimming outside again and B.H. was cracking me up. After a few days i relaxed, and then i started letting myself remember a little. i guess the murals got to me. Long before we discovered the pool, some well-meaning teacher had let some artless and bizarre students have their way with its surrounding walls. The images (a soviet sub, an envelope, a floating head, a torpedo, a white lady teacher, a seahorse) don't suggest any particular era, and although they never seem to fade, they seem old. We would spot an even weirder one each time we came to the pool, and as we kept watching them, began to wonder if they weren't changing and growing. They wallpapered the pool as a kind of redneck Life Aquatic set: a steely albatross sparkly tragic gestation place.

i started underlining chunks of Geronimo Rex: "His heart was not present in the room at all. You did not now where his heart was, but you had the feeling that if you ever went to that place, you would be laughed at" (350); "Fleece became concerned again about his classes and labs and his medical career, I saw little of him, and I -- well, God, there was nothing else to do -- I was becoming an intellectual. This gave misery a little class" (159); "You must play this chorale as a team, nobody having any style, or i'll come around and lay it on your shoulder. The man who has the most individual style has a thing laying on his shoulder!" (85); "Have been sleeping naked, as usual, and my own body has become an immense bore to me" (118); "What was it some professor said about Florida? . . . That Florida was unique in going straight from barbarism to decadence without an intervening period of civilization" (146). i forgot where i was. i brought my ipod to soundtrack the kids in the pool and to insulate myself against the shitty popular radio station screaming at us all. Then i started bringing my camera. i'd read for a while, swim laps when i got too hot, then eventually creep up to the walls. i was photographing sections as closely as possible without blurring the image. i started thinking they were moving again, see. And there's this: they were talking to me. Well, they weren't, but he was. i was sprawled on top of him with my stomach pressed against the small of his back and my arms around his neck and he had us docked in the shallow end. He was narrating each image in our secret language and laughing, and i could hear myself laughing, too.

Finally, Harry settles on Prissy, who's barely eighteen, and he marries her. And then she's pregnant. And then Harry starts obsessing over Dr. Lariat professor of literature and we don't really hear anything more about his Daddy and Fleece is almost completely gone and music paper rocks scissors' writing in the end. My ex had starting trotting out one of his very young female students a week or so after i left, and we'd been engaged but never got past the diamond, and i'd thought i wanted babies, so it wasn't an easy time. i was disappointed again. i hated everyone i'd ever had to leave because they were too boring or too clingy or too drunk or too far away. i hated Barry Hannah for his hasty conclusion and for insulting vaginas: "Perhaps when they land on Mars they might find something uglier" (366). But i started going back and re-reading passages from GR because i didn't want to read anything else, and i then i moved on to Airships, because even though Harry had sort of crapped out he felt guilty about it and knew his fuck-ups in a painfully embarrassing way. And even though Lariat had a bad case of vagina dentata and Harry had halfway caught it, too, Fleece was made differently. And even though much of the language is racist as hell, the boys get the evil white power villain in the end, and Harley Butte, mixed race musical genious, is the prince of them all. And i supposed i was okay, too. It's not every girl who has such pretty talking pictures and such perfect boots and such strange and difficult and wonderful stories to tell about her ex-lovers.

callipygian rondure

Bending slightly toward me who sat scanning his rough draft of paper #2, my student chuckled and said, "You know, John Berger is sort of like an intelligent Austin Powers." Nostalgia:1. Marxism: 0.

"Publicity is, in essence, nostalgic. It has to sell the past to the future. It cannot itself supply the standards of its own claims. And so all its references to quality are bound to be retrospective and traditional. It would lack both confidence and credibility if it used a strictly contemporary language." --J.B.