Pages from a Cold Island

by Frederick Exley

  This guy and I laughed like hell, uproariously, and so goofy drunk was I that for the rest of our conversation I slipped in and out of the giggles.

  Twice I’d asked him where he was from in Florida, and twice he’d evaded answering by saying only “the west coast.” The west coast of Florida is eight hundred miles long. Now I demanded, “Where on the west coast?”

  He smiled sheepishly. “Can’t say. Don’t even ask me. I can’t tell anybody with a straight face.”

  “Try.”

  He mumbled something I didn’t catch.

  “What’s that?” I was insistent.

  “Panacea” he snapped. “Panacea! I ain’t shittin’ yuh!”

  Wide-eyed with mirth, I said, “P-A-N-A-C-E-A?”

  “Panacea,” he repeated glumly. “Ain’t that awful? Ain’t that the height of fuckin’ pretension?” He groaned. He shuffled his feet in a silly little soft-shoe. In mock horror he furiously encased his cheeks with the palms of his hands, a mamma mia thing. Again we laughed uproariously.

  Then it was time for him to catch his plane and we shook hands very enthusiastically. With his free hand he reached across to me and in the warmly intimate Italian way squeezed the humerus muscles of my right arm just below the shoulder. So I did the same to him. He told me to look him up when I got back to Florida.

  “At Panacea!”

  We laughed again.

  He said, “Goddam, good fellow, I enjoyed it, really enjoyed it. And you know something? I’m goin’ home. Home, Exley, home.”

  Then it was “take care” and “ciao” and “luck, man, luck” and “andante presto” and “You’ll be okay” and “buono fortune” and “seein’ you” and “arrivederci.”

  And what I had heard that day on the Sony in the cabin of my friend’s Hatteras, spoken in the mellifluous tones of Mr. Cronkite, the news that forced my head to the table, released in me this awesome pent-up grief, that had me paraphrasing Nabokov’s Pnin and over and over dumbly repeating he won’t haf nofing left, was that the hurricane called Agnes, which afterward would wreak such havoc as it flowed northward and spent itself through the Carolinas, Virginia, into Pennsylvania and New York, had entered the republic from the Gulf of Mexico. It’s point of entry and the place that had taken the full brunt of its winds had the improbable name of Panacea.

  I once had a friend suffering from ulcerated colitis. Eventually it reached the point where he could not drink two bottles of beer and trust himself to get to the men’s room and get his pants down on time. He went from specialist to specialist, was put on one diet after another (cereals and other foods that linger in the intestinal tract) and was invariably told the same thing: an operation was necessary. Still in his mid-twenties, and a gifted athlete on the local semipro level, he could not abide the thought of having his lower intestine removed, having a surgical sphincter created in his side, and a lifetime of draining his stool into what he called “a fucking perfumed fucking feces bag.” When he’d lost fifty pounds, when in their prognoses the specialists had graduated from cautious phrases like “it looks suspicious” and “it’s possibly precancerous” to the flat-out fact that he was toying with his life, and when at last during a city league basketball game he evacuated in his gym pants, he got the message and scheduled himself for surgery.

  One Sunday noon his wife called me and said that the following morning he was checking into Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester for the operation, that at the moment he was out somewhere having a final drunk, and that as I understood would I find him and stick with him. I found him at Canale’s in the Sand Flats, the first bar I went to. He was on his second beer.

  I said, “Okay, pal, I’m your man. We’re gonna hit every bar in Watertown, get drunker than a coot, then I’m gonna buy you the biggest dish of spaghetti and meatballs in Canale’s—garlic bread, the works. But the first thing you’re gonna do is switch to whiskey. Giving you beer is like feeding Epsom salts to an infant.”

  “Deal.”

  In my car we’d come up out of The Flats, turned right on Massey and swung into Holcomb Street, had just turned left at the country club at West Flower Avenue, and were traveling east through what in our naïveté we used to call “The 400 Section.” It was a brilliant sunny day in late spring. We were going to begin at the Cold Creek Inn southeast of the city, hit all the places on the outskirts and in gradually contracting circles work our way back to the heart of town and Canale’s for pasta. To keep up his courage my friend was regaling me with what a bunch of preposterous quacks the specialists were, reminding me of all the dough he’d spent just to be told to eat “cream of fucking wheat,” and because I knew he needed his raving I didn’t bother to remind him that every one of those specialists had told him that surgery would sooner or later be necessary.

  “You know what finally convinced me?” he demanded. “It wasn’t taking a big dump right in my pants during a basketball game. Not by a fucking long shot. It was this. The last joker I went to told me Loretta Young had had the same operation. Jesus, Ex, I laughed right in the bug ger’s face. Loretta Young? I mean, that’s pulling out all the stops. What? Not Joe DiMaggio, mind you, not Wilt Chamberlain—Loretta Fucking Young! I mean, if that sappy bastard is gonna throw poor Loretta at me he’s desperate—I mean, desperate—and I gotta be scared. Right? I mean, butter wouldn’t melt in that broad’s armpit. Now every time I see her bouncin’ downstage to the front of the boob tube in one of those chiffon gowns of hers I start yakkin’ at her. ‘Who you kiddin’, Loretta?’ I say. ‘I know all about you.’ The last time I was yakkin’ like that my bride started bawlin’ and threw a full fuckin’ bowl of popcorn at me!”

  We were both roaring with laughter when suddenly, and this was a cry I’d heard a dozen times before, he bellowed, “Oh, shit! Potty time!”

  With desperate urgency I jammed the brakes, mumbling as I did so, “That fucking beer.”

  Outside the car, he could not go to his right as there was nothing but the open expanse of Ives Hill fairways jammed now with golfers, so he went hurriedly round the back of the car, quickly crossed the street to the front lawn of a large white-shuttered brick house, and next to a high hedge separating that house from its neighbor dropped his pants and the flow began immediately. Solemnly removing a package of Kleenex from the glove compartment, I jogged across the street, stood in front of him, and as well as I could protected him from the view of passing motorists. From the property next-door a man holding a croquet mallet stepped through the hedge and said something about “drunken bums.” When I said that though a good case could be made for our bumhood we weren’t drunk and that what was happening obviously couldn’t be avoided, his anger refused to be abated and he pointed out how abhorrent this was in front of his and his neighbors’ children with whom he was having a Sunday afternoon croquet game. All popeyes and indignation he was.

  “I’m calling the police.”

  I was on the verge of telling him to do anything he damn pleased, call the FBI for all of me, but that he better go back on his own property before I grew irritated and knocked his teeth out when a little boy about five, whose croquet mallet was as tall as he, stepped through the hedge. With great and touching dignity he looked at my squatting friend, then at me, then at his father, then back at my friend, and with the marvelous ingenuousness and directness of children said, “Are you sick, mister?” to which my friend and I laughed in unison, my friend with a weary and heavy exhaustion saying, “Sick to be sure, kid. Sick to be sure. You and your daddy go back and finish your game, I’ll be okay.”

  Then I handed him the Kleenex, then his pants were up, then we were in the car and gone, laughing, and I know of no way of equating those days following the news of Hur ricane Agnes and Panacea other than in equating my state to that of my friend’s malaise, save that in lieu of lower intestine my tear ducts were ulcerated. It was as though I’d touched the lodestone of some universal grief and found it infectious, and though the death of Edmund Wilson was certainly tied
up in it and the memory of that guy at La Guardia, it had nothing whatever to do with self-pity: it was as though my entire being, at times over which I had no control, were ridding itself of some putrefaction of grief, were eliminating the soul’s sick fecal matter.

  One afternoon in the lounge of Cavallario’s Steak House in the Bay I was drinking and talking with two attractive young couples from Syracuse, and one of the men told an incredibly funny story. In general the tale reflected how little the word fuck has come to mean in our society; in particular it had to do with a guy who couldn’t employ two words without one of them being that word; in that the story had a rising crescendo of punch lines, each funnier than its predecessor, it was the hardest kind to tell; the young man who told it was very gifted, as he’d have to be to get away with it in mixed company; I’d started roaring even before he’d got to the first of the punch lines, and presently I was hysterical, ready to go under the table and roll tummy-huggingly around the carpeting and plead with the guy to refrain.

  “Whoa! No more, no more, I beg you.”

  But then an unsettling thing happened. Before he reached the end of the joke I suddenly detected that everyone at the table had ceased laughing and was staring in open-mouthed and shocked dismay at me and that, like my buddy’s molten stool pouring forth from his diseased body, grief was again erupting from me. Furious with aggravation I bolted upright, spilling my drink on the table, fled the lounge and, head down, rushed breathlessly past the moored cruisers to the end of the village docks, repeating over and over, “He won’t haf nofing left.”

  And though I had never learned to pray there was something of the devotional in my ramblings. I invoked the Spanish god of storms, Huracán. “Hey!” I cried. “Listen here, just listen to me: don’t let it be that stucco house, that patioed blue pool, that teak-decked Chris-Craft. No, no, no.” It was too much like the irony of classical tragedy, or the irony of the world in which we live from the stench of the womb to the rot of the shroud, the good man coming to terms with his lot only to discover it is already too late. And so addressing myself to this prick Huracán I said, “If you could have seen his face, you wouldn’t do this thing. You see, after a quarter of a century his presence exuded the exaltation of the ultimate acceptance of what his life had been, that life so vividly and humbly illustrated in those colored Polaroid prints of what he’d made for himself. ‘Home, Exley, home,’ he’d said and I know you are not wanton enough to erase all that. He won’t haf nofing left.”

  But as the days passed and Agnes moved her monstrously dumb and hideously brutal way up the coast, and on the colored screen there came the bewildered, drawn and haunted faces of those in her wake, I came at last to accept Agnes’s evil whimsicality and grief was with me always, it ballooned in me, weighed me down, I carried it like a knap sack bulging with iron skillets. It came on me with the abruptness of my friend’s relentlessly uncontrollable shit. I’d be taking my first bite into a porkchop of what looked an altogether delicious supper, and frantically straight up from the table I’d come, out the screen door and into the backyard where, dropping into a chair of the umbrellaed lawn table, my head would fall to my arms, and always now there was this he won’t haf nofing left. Like a man possessed or LSD-high on grief, I was up and down the stairs a thousand times a day, all day I fled between house and Hatteras where I’d have two quick belts of vodka, in some oddly insane way hoping that the fury of my movement would prevent these terrifying “bowel” movements.

  But have I not strained the reader’s credulity to the breaking point—nay, to the point of inviting his rightful scorn, his sneering mockery, his derisory hilarity—by ask ing him to believe that these days of immoderate grief “had nothing whatever to do with self-pity”? to accept that this daily deluge was utterly divorced from any tears I was lay ing at the feet of my drunken and absurd self? to swallow that my “nobility” was of such stunning grandeur that this unseemly woe was brought on by nothing other than the death of EW, a man I’d never known save through his writ ings, and the tragedy that had likely befallen that funny self-proclaimed wop with whom I’d passed a couple loony hours in an airport bar? Knowing that the reader, like me, grew up in the penumbra of seven-foot-high images of Mr. Clark Gable and Mr. Duke Wayne and was educated to the notion that such unmanliness lent itself to nothing short of damnation, I of course invite his mockery. I might apologize by saying that as an “unstable” man I was obviously undergoing a “breakdown” during those endless days, then offer the reader some marvelously pointed psychological explanation to which he’d be able to nod his noggin wisely and say, “Ah, I see. I understand.”

  But I shan’t. In the first place, I haven’t for years seen any validity whatever in the Freudian voodoo and cannot read the most obvious psychological maxims without my nose plugging and wrinkling in the most exorbitant distaste. In the second place, there come moments with every writer when he yearns to address his reader familiarly and say something he constantly fights against saying. Due to a vow I made twenty-odd years ago when I was just out of college, had just taken my first job in New York City, and was living in a lonely Y.M.C.A. room, the effort will prove doubly strenuous for me. Having very little money to do the town. I spent most of my free time reading the newspapers (there were seven then!) and there was a certain sports columnist, Jimmy Cannon, who on occasion—and though I admired him immensely—used to drive me mad! In these particular columns Jimmy’d invite his talentless and closeted reader to step into the shoes of the mighty.

  “You are Joe DiMaggio, the son of an immigrant San Francisco fisherman,” Mr. Cannon would begin, “and you are the greatest center fielder who ever played in Yankee Stadium, and you are married to Marilyn Monroe, the heartthrob of a nation.”

  It goes without saying that, lying on an iron cot in a bleak Y.M.C.A. room, with three bucks in my pocket to last me until payday, I’d take heated umbrage with Jimmy and talk right back to him, aloud.

  “Nah, nah, Jimmy, Joe DiMaggio I ain’t. The greatest center fielder who ever played in Yankee Stadium I ain’t ever gonna be! And about as close as I’ll ever get to Marilyn Monroe will be to get that fouled handkerchief hidden under the clean shirts in my dresser and do a savage number on my prick while looking at the latest Life photo of Marilyn!”

  For that reason, and to this day, I’ve never been able to address the reader with the familiar “you” and write a line like “You are driving down Route 66 and you look across the wide green pastures to your right and you see the moocows grazing lazily in the sun” because I’ve invariably imagined my reader saying, “Nah, nah, Exley, I ain’t driving down Route 66 and I don’t wanna see no fucking moocows grazing lazily in the sun!” Be that as it may, let me say here and now, and at last put to rest my fatuous hangup, that of course those days were excessively com pounded by the most reprehensible self-pity.

  And fuck you!

  One day on the Hatteras I was well into a fifth of vodka, rereading Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, when I had what I thought an inspired notion. At the glass booth on the docks I charged the call to my home phone and after the usual hassle with the operator at last got through to a policeman in Panacea. Drunkenly I explained everything.

  “Conceded it sounds crazy,” I said. “Saying the guy’s a friend of mind and not even knowing his name. But he is, my compari. Look, don’t hang up. How big can Panacea be? Yeah, the heavy equipment business. An Italian guy. Lives right on the Gulf there, a white stucco house with a pool. Three kids, all grown, the oldest boy is up in Canada, the other an ensign in the navy, and the baby daughter Lucia is over in Florence bangin’ some greaser—no, only kiddin’, she’s over there studyin’. Yeah, I can appreciate that you’ve had a bad storm down there and how busy you are, that’s what the fuck I’m callin’ about. Just give me the fuckin’ guy’s name and I’ll call’m. Just wanna make sure everythin’s okay.”

  The policeman hung up on me.

  I told the operator I’d been cut off and got through to
him again.

  Sore, he said, “You’re drunk, boy, get yourself some sleep.”

  He rang off again and I made my way slowly back to the Hatteras. I drank all night and well into the morning. When I awoke later in the day, and I do not remember how I got home much less into bed, I opened my eyes once again to Mr. Walter Cronkite (it was as though he’d summoned me up from drunken slumber) and as I focused on the screen there leapt from among the colored shadows another image from out of the past, that of my “friend” Ms. Gloria Steinem. My days of grief ended as abruptly as they’d begun.

  5

  The Democratic primaries were over and South Dakota’s Senator George McGovern held a substantial enough dele gate lead to appear a first-ballot Presidential nominee at the upcoming Miami convention. In Washington the party’s platform and credential committees were meeting to draft a platform and entertain challenges to the seating of those delegations that did not appear to have honored the Democrats’ new guidelines for a representative corpus of women, blacks, chicanos and young voters in the proportion that they in fact existed in a state. The “nonpartisan” Women’s National Caucus was hovering churlishly in the wings making their demands known.

  Ms. Steinem had come to town in a huff.

  One of the women’s demands was that the convention be co-chaired by a woman (in the colossal nit-picking of their unisexually prone minds they wanted their selection called a “chairperson”); and a ghostly memo which was never put forward and which McGovern called a “misunderstanding” had come to light whereby the McGovern high command had apparently suggested appeasing the women by appearing to go along fully cognizant the convention would be chaired by Larry O’Brien. Aides of Alabama’s Governor George Wallace were, among other things, telling the platform committee that the bussing of schoolchildren solely for the purpose of integration was neither financially viable, politically practical, morally right, nor in fact legal. The women’s caucus demanded women be granted total dominion over their reproductive means and insisted the platform adopt an “abortion on demand” clause (an astute pundit had written that all the McGovern claques were saying “gimme this and gimme that,” a far cry from John Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you” motif) and it now appeared that the McGovern forces were backing away from this sticky issue.