Free Moise and the World of Reason by Tennessee Williams

beginning of a two-week gig and a couple of days later the paper said that the kid was going to be buried at a certain cemetery the next afternoon, and I went there with flowers to put on the grave, and I want you to know that a week later than that, the paper announced that the rich industrialist had jumped off the roof of some fat-cat asylum and the paper named the same cemetery where the remains were going to be planted a couple of days later. Well, I thought about you and us and love good and bad and got on a crazy high and did a disgusting thing. I went to the burial service with a spiritual look on my face like I was truly bereaved and I listened to the preacher extolling the beautiful quality of the departed spirit and each time he invented some beautiful quality to extol I made a loud sobbing noise. I had pushed up close to the relatives of the departed who looked uncomfortably cold in their fur coats and anxious to get home. It had started snowing on the casket covered with hothouse flowers and his nearest and dearest were much more interested in the limousines than the eulogy for the departed. They looked like they’d never heard of him except as the President of the Miracle Fiber Plant but I went SOB , SOB , SOB and GULP , GULP , GULP like the printed expressions of grief in a comic strip and all the while I was holding my jockstrap in my overcoat pocket and pushing up closer to the casket with the blanket of roses in the snow, Jesus, I swear this was the scene, out of sight, even the mother of the son of a bitch, she was so old there was scarcely any point in her leaving the cemetery but she was struggling to get on her feet and back into a heated limousine. Nobody seemed to notice her efforts to get up. This was an acid trip I was on, it was after my last matinée in that frozen city and my jockstrap in my pocket was still warm from a performance in it, and do you know I helped the old lady to her feet and I led her to the casket about to be lowered and right in front of her open-mouth face I took out the jockstrap and raised it over the casket and over my head so everybody could see it and recognize what it was and the preacher’s and the morticians’ mouths dropped open like the old lady’s as I dangled it in the snow above the rose-covered casket as it started to be cranked down and I shouted, ‘This is in memory of the boy John Summers that the departed seduced into death last week in his tenth-floor bedroom,’ and then I dropped it onto the descending rose-covered casket and hustled the Fiber King’s mother to a big black shiny cockroach limousine and pushed her ass in and then raced out of the graveyard like I was high on skates with acid, and, Jesus, yes, did I ever steal that show from the Fiber King’s interment, well, I have stopped some shows and I have stolen some shows but never better than that one, and now I know why I did it, it was done more as an expression of social indignation and racial protest than in memory of John Summers or in comment on the Fiber King’s black-hearted love and”
    He was about to go on when Moise put a quiet stop to it.
    â€œNow, Lance, you know that eulogies are not delivered in graveyards.”
    â€œNo, they’re not,” I agreed. “The eulogies are delivered in a church and in the graveyard a few words are read from the Book of Common Prayer, so obviously your brain was confused with acid.”
    â€œBe that as it may,” said Lance, “I had the honor and satisfaction of burying my jockstrap with a king, that I know, and what’s it matter if I heard the eulogy at the church or the cemetery, I got a free ride there in a Cadillac but had to go back to the hotel on wings of acid.”
    â€œLet’s drop the subject,” I suggested to Lance since it appeared to me that it was too heavy to hold even with six warm hands in a winter room.
    â€œAll right, love, but just remember that I can be meaner