Free Moise and the World of Reason by Tennessee Williams Page B

there. And so I was hauled off for observation at Governor’s Island which is a sanitarium in the East River, in case you don’t know, and the observation which was made of me there did not result in an early release despite the protests of Moise and Clare who visited me every Sunday. I wasn’t working out loud, or working at all, I was mostly desperately waiting for something which was, in my case, the return of the living nigger on ice for his holiday gig at the Garden.
    Terrifying experiences like that have a maturing effect, especially in the bin, for even when you are staring vacantly while waiting, you notice certain occurrences outside the storm in your head. I will describe only one. Among the inmates in my ward on the island was a travesty of an aging queen who had entered as a dyed blond but whose hair had now turned silver and who was always in motion, undulating up and down the corridor and around the dayroom, always with a comb in his hand, touching up his curls, and making the mistake of pausing to roll his eyes directly in front of an Irish truck driver who was in there for observation because of nightly wife-beating, whose fists always doubled up tight as evening approached as if he were expecting his wife to appear. Well, one evening this fantastic queen paused in front of him once too often and the truck driver sprang up and smashed a fist in the mouth of the queen, removing all his front teeth. This in itself was not particularly remarkable, I suppose, but what does strike me as deserving of notation as I sit here now with the noisy clock pushing five and still no Charlie, is that the following morning the silver queen undulated again down the corridor into the dayroom, running the comb through the curls with his swollen lips ajar on the crimson cavern of his mouth’s interior where those sudden extractions had been performed. The truck driver was seated exactly where he had been the evening before and the silver queen with the crimson cavern stopped again exactly in front of him with the same ocular rotation and the falsetto simper and something happened but I don’t know what. I honestly don’t remember although I know that something of a shocking nature did happen.
    Of course I also know that I have recorded this queen and truck driver scene as if it were comic-strip humor which is certainly not how it struck me when I was twenty.
    â€œTerrifying experiences,” “maturing effect,” crock of shit . . .
    Oh, Christ, now I remember. The truck driver sprang up again and took the queen in his arms and thrust his tongue into the bloody cavern of his mouth with a moan of longing for which transcendent is not too romantic a term.
    And so perhaps “maturing effect” is applicable to these experiences after all, despite the fact that I don’t know how they matured me nor to what purpose.

    Just a minute ago I wandered outside of the hooked rectangle we live in to look through the windows of the unpeopled vastness in which the rectangle crouches. I don’t remember having ever done that before at night. Well, it is no longer night but after five in the morning which also qualifies as a wolf’s hour when it is dark.
    My first impression of the dark vastness was one of silence. Then I began to notice little sounds in it, the distance-muted patter of rodents’ feet and then the despairing squeal of a small creature assaulted by a larger.
    I wondered a number of things: would there be rats in the place if a section of it were not inhabited by human life? I thought, Probably yes, since rats are beings which survive through concealment, in over- and underground places which offer a secret existence from all but themselves and the menace of cats which is to them what Moise means by “the sudden subway” for people. I have a repugnance for rats and all other vermin, although I admire their cunning and their persistence under all circumstances through