Don't Make Me Stop Now (2 page)

Oh Teresa, please surprise me. I want you to be different, therefore you will be different. For one thing, she waited a long time after he told the story before speaking. This was a good
sign. The story demanded lag time. The longer she waited, though, the more hopeful Yancey became, the more pressure he applied to her question. Which is why it hurt so deeply — hurt in a place very near where he took his breath — when she asked the one question no one had bothered to ask him before, the one he did not ever want to answer.

“What,” said Teresa, her voice a little croaky from disuse (which only made Yancey want her more), “happened next?”

The turn signal clicked. Yancey's grandmother slumped over, her mouth open a little. He knew instantly that she was dead, but how? He'd never seen death before, except of course on movie screens. She could have been sleeping but for the unnatural loll of her neck. He felt, instead of panic (which he figured was on its way), a sense of warmth, of peacefulness, for both of them. He looked to the left and to the right. The road was clear. He looked in the rearview mirror; there was no one behind him. To the left and to the right: clear. He put his foot on the gas.

Yancey had had twenty years to think about what happened next, and he'd turned it over in his mind so many times that he had assigned an image to the turning: sugar
spinning on a stick, gathering into a cloud of cotton candy. Like cotton candy, the versions of those moments following the unexpected and lethal blast of “Hot ‘N' Nasty” had been deceptively inviting, disappearing rather tastelessly with each compulsive nibble. Sugar and air, empty calories. Yancey did not care for cotton candy, nor for images of his mind obsessing over what finally was a series of lefts and rights, tap of the brake and slap of the gas pedal. Once he had read an article about a famous French theater critic that spoke of “the ulcer of consciouness: the mind devouring itself.” The phrase needled him when the stick was thrust into the cotton candy chamber, as did the fact that the French theater critic ended his days in an insane asylum, no doubt eating his own excrement, as famously insane Frenchmen are prone to do.

To narrate, for sweet Teresa, what happened next without baggage, to tell it exactly as it happened, free from the self-conscious renderings bathed in the unnatural pinks and blues of artificially colored cotton candy, free from footnotes about insane Frenchmen, free from revision, hyperbole, lies: if he could just pull it off, he'd never have to tell this story again.

He drove a mile or so before his grandmother, jolted as he slowed for a curve, fell forward in such a way that made her look, well, dead. Her chin grazed her breastbone, her arm flopped over toward his side. Yancey pulled off onto Carolina
Avenue, which he knew to disintegrate into a two-track leading to a dumping ground by a ravine. In the woods he stopped at the turnaround, leaned his grandmother over so that her head rested against the window glass. Strangely he did not mind touching her. The heat from the hot-water heater that is the heart had not yet leaked out of her. Her joints were still pliable. She was dead and it was his fault, but he felt calm and oddly focused. A purpose was unfolding, though he did not yet know what it was. However, it was noble and rather simple.

Dusk had been slowly gathering, and with it a chill that Yancey felt because he'd cracked his window to combat an odor growing hard to ignore. He remembered just minutes ago holding his nose at the faint smell of urine. What a wuss I used to be, said Yancey to his grandmother. He took side roads, welcoming the anonymity of darkness, for riding around was the principal form of teenaged entertainment in his town, and people knew his car.

Yancey pulled behind the Dot and Dash, alongside the Dumpster, where no one could park next to him. His grandmother's purse lay on the seat between them. He only took a five.

Old Cedrick was behind the counter. He'd sell booze to a third-grader. Yancey grabbed three tall Bulls from the cooler.

Cedrick said, “You think you're a soul brother?”

Yancey said, “You know you're a bigot?”

Cedrick wrinkled his nose. “Boy, you stink,” he said. “What's that smell?”

Yancey stood at the counter, his change in his hand, trying to think of a comeback. But then he remembered that he was not alone.

“Hey man, you take care.”

“Say what?” said Cedrick. He seemed disappointed, but Yancey had remembered his sister begging him to pick just one person to be nice to.

“Have a good night. Nice talking to you. Hey, I love your store.”

“Boy, get the fuck out of here now before I call the law on your smelly ass.”

In the car the odor was worse. Yancey rolled down the window. He zipped up his windbreaker. He put the change back in his grandmother's purse. He did not
need
the beer to do what he was about to do, but it would not hurt. At least it was what his father expected of him. He did not want to disappoint his father.

Yancey drank the first beer before he even reached the city limits. He tossed the can in the floorboard at his grandmother's feet. He burped, then excused himself. Out toward
Beamon's Wood, the tight series of S-curves beckoned. He finished his second beer and threw the can out of the window near Pope's Pond, accidentally. He thought about going back to get it, but it was dark and he was talking to his grandmother. Some days it seemed he was still talking to her, still in the car, high on Schlitz Malt Liquor, driving around the back roads, had been for twenty years. Often he was confused about what he'd told her recently and what he'd said back then, which wasn't really a problem as this was the nature of time — collapsible, flexible, unreliable. He told her how wonderful it would be to get everyone together — all the people he'd failed, the ones he'd loved and who had loved him however briefly — and have a big party in the woods. I would like to feel, just as long as the party lasts, the attraction that drew me to them in the first place, and them to me. You know, before things fell away. Before whatever it is out there in the air, that thing you people call
heart,
turned back into dive-bombing mosquitoes and swamp fog and dust kicked up from the tractor trailers on the highway. Grandma, how do you make anything last? He chugged his third tall boy as they approached the tightest switchback out by Beamon's Wood. He'd been obeying the speed limit and actually slowed down as they entered the curve. It wasn't as if he wanted to die, too — though to be honest he did not really give much thought
to what injuries he might sustain. Whatever happened was fate — even though he engineered it. The contradiction did not bother him because it was his fate, according to his father, to screw things up. But how could it be his grandmother's fate to be killed by a fat blast of organ, bass, and drum? She deserved better. The road curved to the left, but Yancey and his grandmother, engrossed in conversation, drove intently into the pine forest.

There was something deeply sexy to Yancey about telling someone you maybe love and whom you want to love you back your darkest secrets. Like sex following funerals and excruciating hangovers, the love you make after such a revelation is punctuation, an impassioned if desperate attempt to prove you are, in fact, very much alive. Therefore Yancey, in the silence that followed his answer to her question, moved in close to Teresa, trilled his fingers sweetly in the gaps between her ribs, as if striking a complicated chord on an instrument of which he was an acknowledged master, and listened with his entire body for an answer.

She still hadn't said anything. He had always found it odd that the others had merely accepted the end of the story as
offered. Oh, they had their questions, the ones Yancey had hoped Teresa would not ask, but they'd finished the story for themselves, jerking Yancey out of the car, having him run back to his aunt's house, frantic and shaken, where they had him tell his father exactly what happened and nobly suffer the consequences. And he had never bothered to correct their version, which meant that he could not stay with them.

Teresa, well, she did not pull away from his touch. But nor did her body encourage his. It occurred to him that she might think his interest in her at this moment creepy, inappropriate, but he was willing to take that risk, for the moment he described had taken place twenty years earlier, and if it had ruined his life it was only because he had let it. If, in this silence, Teresa were pulling slightly away from him — so slightly she did not even realize it, as if his story, like rain atop a mountain, had begun an erosion that would ultimately wear them down to nothingness — well, what could he do about it?

Yancey thought of what he did not tell her. It was something she wouldn't believe, something so freaky he often wondered if he'd made it up. As they'd come to rest against a pine tree, the car, miraculously, was still running. Some part of one of them — his grandmother's arm, Yancey's knee — had nudged the tape, which he'd ejected at the stop sign, back into the player. Yancey's head had hit the windshield hard, leaving
a spiderweb of splinter cracks; his forehead was warm and wet with blood. His grandmother had come unlodged from the position he'd taken such pains to place her in earlier, and was also bleeding, her neck twisted crazily so that she was inclined toward him, looking at him expectantly. How could he ever share with anyone that moment when “Hot ‘N' Nasty” took right up where it had left off, in midlyric, as if every day had its own irrepressible sound track, and this song, however inappropriate, belonged to Yancey and his grandmother on the day of her unscheduled departure. They sat there listening. Yancey's legs throbbed. Later he would find that he'd cracked a femur and broken a leg and bruised three ribs, but the pain, at that point, was not located so much in the body as outside the car, in the woods, in the world. There it mostly remained, so many years later, despite Yancey's attempts to bring it back inside, to inhale it and let it out like the synchronized breath of lovers.

I
N THE SONG
“Ain't Gonna Bump No More No Big Fat Woman” by Joe Tex, the speaker or the narrator of this song, a man previously injured before the song's opening chords by a large, aggressive-type woman in a disco-type bar, refuses to bump with the “big fat woman” of the title. In doing so he is merely exercising his right to an injury-free existence thus insuring him the ability to work and provide for him and his family if he has one, I don't know it doesn't ever say. In this paper I will prove there is a hidden meaning that everybody doesn't get in this popular Song, Saying, or Incident from Public Life. I will attempt to make it clear that we as people when we hear this song we automatically think “novelty” or we link it up together with other songs we perceive in
our mind's eye to be just kind of one-hit wonders or comical lacking a serious point. It could put one in the mind of, to mention some songs from this same era, “Convoy” or “Disco Duck.” What I will lay out for my audience is that taking this song in such a way as to focus only on it's comical side, which it is really funny nevertheless that is a serious error which ultimately will result in damage to the artist in this case Joe Tex also to the listener, that is you or whoever.

“About three nights ago/I was at a disco.” (Tex, line 1.) Thus begins the song “Ain't Gonna Bump No More No Big Fat Woman” by the artist Joe Tex. The speaker has had some time in particular three full days to think about what has occurred to him in the incident in the disco-type establishment. One thing and this is my first big point is that time makes you wiser. Whenever Jeremy and I first broke up I was so ignorant of the situation that had led to us breaking up but then a whole lot of days past and little by little I got a handle on it. The Speaker in “Ain't Gonna Bump No More No Big Fat Woman” has had some time now to go over in his mind's eye the events that occurred roughly three days prior to the song being sung. Would you not agree that he sees his life more clear? A lot of the Tellers in the stories you have made us read this semester they wait a while
then
tell their story thus knowing it by heart and being able to tell it better though with
an “I” narrator you are always talking about some kind of “discrepancy” or “pocket of awareness” where the “I” acts like they know themselves but what the reader is supposed to get is they really don't. Well see I don't think you can basically say that about the narrator of “Ain't Gonna Bump No More . . .” because when our story begins he comes across as very clearheaded and in possession of the “facts” of this “case” so to speak on account of time having passed thus allowing him wisdom. So the first thing I'd like to point out is Treatment of Time.

There is a hidden meaning that everybody doesn't get in this particular Song, Saying or Incident from Public Life. What everybody thinks whenever they hear this song is that this dude is being real ugly toward this woman because she is sort of a big woman. You are always talking about how the author or in this case the writer of the song is a construction of the culture. Say if he's of the white race or the male gender when he's writing he's putting in all these attitudes about say minority people or women without even knowing it, in particular ideals of femininity. Did I fully understand you to say that all white men author's basically want to sleep with the female characters they create? Well that just might be one area where you and me actually agree because it has been my experience based upon my previous relationships especially my
last one with Jeremy that men are mostly just wanting to sleep with any woman that will let them. In the song “Ain't Gonna Bump No More No Big Fat Woman,” let's say if you were to bring it in and play it in class and we were to then discuss it I am willing to bet that the first question you would ask, based on my perfect attendance is, What Attitudes Toward Women are Implied or Explicitly Expressed by the Speaker or Narrator of this Song? I can see it right now up on the board. That Lindsay girl who sits up under you practically, the one who talks more than you almost would jump right in with, “He doesn't like this woman because she is not the slender submissive ideal woman” on and on. One thing and I'll say this again come Evaluation time is you ought to get better at cutting people like Lindsay off. Why we have to listen to her go off on every man in every story we read or rap song you bring in (which, okay, we know you're “down” with Lauryn Hill or whoever but it seems like sometimes I could just sit out in the parking lot and listen to 102 JAMZ and not have to climb three flights of stairs and get the same thing) is beyond me seeing as how I work two jobs to pay for this course and I didn't see her name up under the instructor line in the course offerings plus why should I listen to her on the subject of men when it's clear she hates every last one of them? All I'm saying is she acts like she's taking up for the oppressed people
when she goes around oppressing right and left and you just stand up there letting her go on. I'm about sick of her mouth. Somebody left the toilet running, I say to the girl who sits behind me whenever Lindsay gets cranked up on the subject of how awful men are.