High Lonesome

When I was old enough to take the train I did and most days I would not know where I was going, but at 14 I always somehow found myself at Astor Pl. Walk past the cube and take a left on 3rd. Walk to the corner and there at St. Mark's bookstore I would spend my time. The tiny rows of books and looking up at the cashier to pay my crumpled dollars. During one of those trips I found this book. I still have not read every story and maybe I won't, but what I have read has stuck with me. Every couple years or so I read a few more pages or end up finishing something I started. I really can not put my finger on wht exactly it is, but I like it. I liked it at 14 and I like it now. I drink it like wine.


Here is an excerpt from one of my favorite stories:

High Lonesome by Barry Hannah



Through Sunset into the Raccoon Night

I have, like every man, seen all through my life lovely women waiting for someone somewhere. I always get involved, I mean in my head. These women, each wonderful, have elicited fine raptures and dreams. Waiting women, each postured in a special way, each in her separate nook of perfect waiting, a gallery that does not belong to me. They are prepared, sharpened, in their dresses and heels-or in their jeans and sandals, their brave halter tops-all open to the great psychological moment of some man's arrival. Negligence really is out of the question, with the right ones. and I have been that man over and over, besuiting myself for the expectant tastes of these lingering, watchful women. I imagined pleasing each one according to her most curious and valiant wants. The world for a few moments becomes wide and happy, not low and cramped. Even voluptuous. I bring extraordinary gifts to these patient women, thinking all day about them. So it is that I have made love to these women of my heady tableaux and been briefly a happier man for it. I hear the women speak softly, delighted by my presence. This is very good, since nobody else on the earth truly needs me, not even the surgeons's wife Jane in the Audi out there as my business closes, soon. For the world I am impertinent and a malingerer.

I've never found anything I was good at worthy to do here. I surely don't blame the world for that. Through me runs an inveterate refractoriness, almost a will to lose. Really, a choice for the whining and pining, at ease in the infantry of unremarkable losers on the lower end of mobility. What I admire is anguish, casual faith, clothes, poise, and minor disaster, or the promise of it. I like the nose lifted a little. The pride of exemption, yet terror in solitude. This is a busy concept. Perhaps too busy.