But two young friends had organized a ceremony for themselves. Many had loved and needed Drum. They had pleaded over the phone for Smith, of all people, to gather with them, but the town was such a valley of the shadow to Smith, with an air choked by rotten cherries and whiskey, he did not go. He felt cowardly and selfish, because it was ceremonies of pity that most moved him now, but he could not take his part. He asked his sons to appear at the ceremony for him. They wore suits and went to the funeral home and stood with a mournful group of people in wretched cheap dark clothes, and stood quietly for an hour before they discovered it was a rite for another person.
Smith did not like arithmetic or its portents, but he recalled Drum at his death was sixty-six, twice the age of Christ at Golgotha. With Drum this was relevant, and overbore the vile poem. Drum had been a successful carpenter several years previous.
But in Smith’s class ten years before the end, Drum was fiftysix and looked much like Charles Bronson. Big flat nose and thin eyes with a blue nickel gleam in them; three marriages behind him, and two sons by an opera singer far away in Germany. He held a degree in aeronautical engineering from UCLA. He could fix anything, and with stern joyful passion. He had written six unpublished novels. He served in the army in Panama in the years just after the world war, which he would have been a bit young for. Smith stole glances at Drum while he taught, or tried to, with his marriage and grip on things going to pieces. He tried to understand why this old man was in his class, whether he was a fool or a genius. There were indications both ways.
As in Smith’s progress toward the condition of a common drunkard.
Smith wanted to be both lost and found, an impossibility. He was nearly begging to be insane. He saw this fellow of great persuasive ugliness, with his small airy voice and his sighs; the weariness about him, even with his blocky good build and the forearms of a carpenter. He was popular in class even these short weeks into the semester. Drummond was his last name. He pleased the girls around him. He was avuncular and selfless in his comments, with a beam of patient affection in his eyes. Somehow he scared Smith, Drum holding his smile, the flattened great bags under his eyes from rough living and failure. He spoke often of “love” and “quest.” He prefaced many things he said with “I am a Christian,” sadly, as if he were in some dreadful losers’ club.
Paul Smith looked at the table in front of him and had a brief collapse.
“I’m sorry.” He put his hands down flat. There seemed to be a whole bleak country in front of his eyes, the ten hills of his fingers on the desert floor of linoleum, speckled by gray lakes, all dry. “I’m sorry to be confusing. Things aren’t going well at home. Bear with me.”
Drum befriended him. He seemed to be just all at once there, his hand on Smith’s shoulder and the grave twinkle in his eyes. The little smile of a prophet on his lips. Two of the very attractive girls from the class, right behind him, were looking concerned. Maybe they liked Smith. He didn’t know. He couldn’t get a read on much at all these days. Arrogance punctuated by bouts of heartbreaking sentiment had come on Smith since the publication of his last book, which was hailed by major critics and bought by a few hundred people.
He didn’t want to be arrogant, but he was experiencing a gathering distaste for almost everybody. He would nowadays mumble and shout a few things in anguish that seemed loud and eternal, then call class. To others that might seem derelict, but many of his students grandly appreciated the quick hits and release, right in the manner of a punk lecture. Punk was all the rage that year, and in his class was a lame girl wearing a long sash with sleigh bells on it, so that when she wallowed along in the hall on big stomping crutches, a holy riot ensued. She wore enormous eyeglasses but was otherwise dressed and cut punk, wearing a hedge of waxed hair atop her tubular head. She was the punkest of them all, a movement unto herself. Smith noticed that Drum was very kind to her and cheered her various getups every class meeting. The girl was unceasingly profane too. This seemed to interest Drum even more. He grinned and applauded her, this funny Christian Drum.
Nevertheless, she had gone to the chairwoman about Smith’s asthmatic style. She loved his hungover explosions, but complained that he cut them too short and she was not getting her money’s worth. Smith was incredulous. It was his first experience with a vocal minority, the angry disabled woman. Angel B. was very serious about her writing — very bad — and viewed it as her only salvation. He was not imparting the secrets of the art to her. She must know everything, no holding back. All this with a punk’s greediness and nearly solid blue language, the bells shaking. Smith noted that he made no complaint about the bells. Smith planned to kill her and insist on one of her prettier banalities for her headstone, so that she could be mocked for centuries. But this man Drum loved her even as the talentless bitch she was. How could he be here offering to help Smith?
“What can we do, Paul?” Drum was whispering and uncleish. The two girls nodded their wishes to help too. Smith looked them over. He was already half in love with the taller one, pretty with lean shanks, who looked like she was right then slipping into a bathtub with Nietzsche, that lovely caution about her. The other was pre-Raphaelite, a mass of curly hair around a pale face very oval, the hair coiled up on her cheeks and separating for the full lips.
“We could drink,” said Smith, dying for a taste. He was imagining a long telescope of whiskey and soda through which to view these newcomers to his pain. He liked people waving like liquid images, hands reaching toward him.
At home the end was near. His wife, just out of the tub, would cover her breasts with her arms as she went to her drawers in their bedroom. Smith watched, alarmed and in grief. No old times anymore. She meant, These are for something else, somewhere else down the road. He had hoped to hang on to ambivalence just a little bit longer. He wanted her more than ever. He said unforgettable, brutal things to her. His mouth seemed to have its own rude life. Here he was, no closer to her than a ghoul gazing through a knothole to her toilet, the hole rimmed with slobber, in their own big smart house.
They all went to the Romeo Bar on the university strip. Smith saw Drum drive up with the girls in a bleached mustard Toyota with a bee drawn on it at the factory. Smith thought it was an art statement, but it was not. Drum was poor.
He wore unironed clothes, things deeply cheap, dead and lumpy even off the rack at bargain barns, and the color of harmful chemicals, underneath them sneakers with Velcro snaps instead of shoestrings. The clothes of folks from a broken mobile home, as a pal of Smith’s had described them. Drum at fifty-six lived upstairs in a small frame house of asbestos siding. In the lower story lived his mother, whom he called the Cobra. The brand of his smokes was Filter Cigarettes. His beer was white cans labeled Beer.