Nothing surprised Drum, and the girls were rapt as Smith poured forth. He was a bothered half-man, worn out by the loss of heart and music of the soul.
Drum agreed about the times, entirely. “There should be only a radio in every home, issuing bulletins on the war. The war of good against evil. That’s all the news we need,” he said, directing the bar air like a maestro. “But all they give us is facts, numbers, times. Enough of this and nobody cares about the war anymore. Why, all television addresses is the busybody in everybody!
“We’re born to kill each other. First thing in the morning we take something to numb us, then parachute into the sordid zones of reality. Layers of dead skin on us, layers!” he finished.
Everything surprised the girls. They seemed to adore being confidantes in Drum’s presence. They were anxious to become writers and have sorrows of their own. The grave male details of Smith’s distress the girls thought exquisite. That through a knothole looking at her toilet thing was beautiful, said the pre-Raphaelite Minny.
Later, they all stayed over at Smith’s green hovel by the railroad tracks he’d rented as his writing place, a heartbreaking first move toward divorce. Minny took ether and began talking about her enormous clitoris, a thing that kept her in nerves and panic every waking hour. Pepper passed out before she could recall any true sorrow. Drum went back in the kitchen with some of Smith’s stories. He had on half-glasses bought at a drugstore, and Smith saw him foggily as a god: Charles Bronson as a kitchen god. Smith retired with Minny.
Then in the morning his wife knocked on the door. Smith answered in a leather overcoat, nude underneath. He was stunned by drink and ether, and his wife’s presence simply put a sharpness on his wrecked eyesight. Behind him in a bedsheet sat Minny in front of a drum set. She was sitting there smiling at Smith’s palomino-haired wife. It was her first scandal, she told them later.
His wife said something about divorce papers, and Smith slapped her. She rammed the door shut.
“Oh, how Old World!” Minny cried. She dropped the sheet and rose naked and curly like something from a fountain. Already Smith was tired of her. He loved Pepper, the lean beauty who could not get her sorrow out, asleep in the rear room.
“That’s no good, Paul. You shouldn’t hit.” Drum had awoken and come out. His big fingers were around a fresh cold beer. “Oh, I hit my second wife. She thrived on it. Some women like hitting, they work for it. But it’s a bad thing. A man of your sensitivity, with that sad little child in you, you won’t survive, is what I’m saying.”
“I love the sad child!” said Minny.
“But it makes an end to things at least. You need to end things, Paul. Purgatory is much rougher than hell. Well I know. You’ve got to wish them well, and be off. Wish them well in love, hope they have good orgasms.”
“My God!” Smith could not imagine this charity.
Sometime later in the week Smith asked Drum how he’d lost three wives.
“Because I was a failure, man!” Drum seemed delighted. “I wrote and wrote and couldn’t get published. I quit all my jobs. I’d had it with facts, the aeronautics industry. Working plans to fly in a coal mine, baby! The heart, Paul, the heart, that’s where it is.”
On the last of his GI bill the man was taking ceramics, photography, sculpture, and Smith’s writing class.
“I pride myself on being a dilettante! I am looking for accidental successes. Heart accidents. I want to slip down and fall into something wonderful!”
As for Drum’s physical heart, there was a bad thing running in his family. His father and two older brothers had gone out early with coronaries, and he himself took nitroglycerin tablets to ward off angina.
Even Smith’s punk band excited Drum. Anything declamatory of the heart moved him. He was very often their only audience. He applauded and commended, through their vileness. They switched instruments, versatile in absence of talent. It didn’t matter.
“Everything must be explored! Nothing left untouched!” Drum shouted, slugging down his cheap beer, smoking his generics.
They played their own “Yeast Infection Blues” and a filthy cover of George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” The regular guitarist was a vicious harelip pursued all over town for bad checks. The singer was a round man with dense eyeglasses and a squint who sold term papers to fraternity boys. They called him the Reverend. The bass man was a boy who never wore shoes, hardly bathed, and in appearance approached the late Confederate veterans around Appomattox — gaunt, hang-necked, and smutty. Drum absorbed them all. They were his children, junior alcoholics to Smith. Sometimes he’d dance with Minny or Pepper. They shook the little green house and the police came. Perfect.
Smith poured Southern Comfort in a Pepsi can in order to make it through his lectures, which seemed a crucifixion. The crippled girl Angel B. seemed satisfied, liberated more thoroughly and writing even worse. As for his own heart, Smith wanted to get rid of it. He missed his wife terribly. The thing pounded as if it were an enormous fish in him. He was barred from his old home. The band was angry over his lack of endurance on the drums. One night Drum brought him over some chicken soup, vitamin B, and gluconate. He was worried.
“Look at you. Look at this room,” he said.
Smith’s SS overcoat was spattered with white paint. He had painted everything instead of cleaning. He had painted even Minny’s dog. It was under the table licking itself. He had nailed bedsheets to the floor. The novel he was writing was strewn out in copies all over the musical instruments. He and the band were singing his novel. The children from his first marriage were not allowed to visit him anymore. He had been fired at the college. Bare inside his overcoat, with a Maltese cross made by Drum hanging from a chain around his neck, he had grown so thin that his wedding band had fallen off somewhere. He was now almost pure spirit, as Minny called him.
“We need your big heart, Paul. The forces of good need you. Technique and facts and indifference are out there winning. Money is winning, mere form and the tightasses are winning. Commerce is making the town uglier and uglier. We Christians need you. You’re giving over to low anger and spite, drinking away your talent. An old bad thing coiled in the dust, that’s not you.”
Smith poured the remainder of a jar of cherries into a mug half filled with Southern Comfort. The overcoming taste would remind Smith forever of his last days in this town.
Drum had made the mug. On it was an ugly face with a cigarette in its lip. It was one of the forms of “Sarge,” an old army drunk Drum had known in Panama. The man had been only in his thirties, like Smith, but already grotesque. He would line up for review every morning, everything wrong with his uniform, but with a tiny smile and ruined goggle-eyes, maimed in every inch by the night before. He’d been busted from sergeant four times.
Later Smith fought with the band and threw them out. Minny ran out of Valium. Now living was almost impossible without constant fornication. People with police records began showing up in the house. Some played musical instruments or sang, then stole the equipment. One night while he was plying Minny, who poured out high spiritual sighs, he had to have a drink. On his way to the kitchen, he caught a thief in the house. The man sprinted out the back window as Smith pulled his father’s antique shotgun off the wall. Then out came Minny, screaming for him please to not shoot anybody.