Last Notes from Home

by Frederick Exley

  “It seems to me that Shakespeare,” she concluded, and I remember her precise words, old pardner, “wants nothing less than to rub our faces in the muck of life.”

  But do you see what I’m driving at, Big Jim? Not only was that lovely brilliant young lady’s uncharacteristic spiel the only thing I consciously took from high school English, but that catalogue of deplorable nauseous vices has turned out to be an apt description of our history of the three decades since that long-ago day. And I often wonder what my demure cellist does now. She’s probably married to the chairman of the English Department at Northwestern, lives in twelve rooms in Winnetka, and at seven on Sunday evenings plays in a professional string quartet. Or, has she not made her adjustment to the hard facts of history, perhaps she huddles in a corner of a madhouse and weeps great scalding tears from out those dark blue eyes. Whatever, I wish I had a tape recording of her modulated, precise, and abrasive diatribe to send to Winnetka. No, no, Mistuh Dillon, no I don’t. In retrospect that would be such a cheap malicious shot. For didn’t we all, at seventeen, believe Willie the Shake rubbed our faces in the muck of life? It’s now become so clear. Let’s say good-bye, old pardner, to Ms. Edna Ferber and in apology tip our hats to Mr. Shakespeare. He may not have saved our reason, but were it not for him we wouldn’t feel as comfortable with the stench we cast.

  But peace, marshal. The Serax takes me down and down and at the moment I have neither the wit, cunning, nor arrogance of poise to sustain my ramblings. In any event, I forgive you your lardass, the crow’s-feet about and the melancholy in your blue eyes. More than that, Big Jim, I’m sure I’d like you as a man. What little I’ve read about you indicates that, save for the millions which have obviously accrued to your fame, you carry your worldwide notoriety lightly and ironically. You have become somewhat hermetic and made yourself inaccessible to snooping moronic Hollywood reporters. You do not don the ludicrous red cummerbund and tuxedo of the popinjay and appear at “award-winning” ceremonies and kiss people you despise on the mouth. You refuse to let Johnny Carson get off his corny one-liners at your expense.

  Ah, yes, good for you, marshal, beautiful! It is true I read someplace you were divorced. But who among us in the new America has not been divorced—I myself twice, Big Jim! Still, when we both look back, old pardner, and as Calvinistic and preposterous as it may seem coming from the likes of me, when all our one-night jejune honeymoons are over, I’m uneasily certain that wisdom will dictate that it would have taken infinitely more of what people used to call character to have hung in there with the same woman than to have walked away. I mean, look at the great Mr. Hemingway’s first posthumously published book, A Moveable Feast. Above and beyond everything else, it was a valentine, a veritable valentine, to his first wife Hadley and suggested that all the women after Hadley were mere pilot fish. How that must have rankled Miss Mary! But why bother hanging in? Right? In our new affluent and mobile society it only takes about twenty minutes to pack one’s bags and go out the door. I tell you this, Mistuh Dillon, because as I jabber away it occurs to me that had I wanted to I could have made it with either of my wives.

  Too, and I hesitate to bring this up, Big Jim, but I read recently that your young daughter, like Papa Hemingway, died by her own hand. What can I say, old pardner, that hasn’t been said throughout the ages? For her immortal soul I offer a prayer—I offer it at this very moment!—and for your grief and agony I extend my heartfelt sympathies. That said, I shall not grieve for her. What was it tie wise Mr. Vonnegut, Jr., said? That in the world we live in “paranoia is an act of faith”? And that is the way I feel about suicide, marshal—that it too is an act of faith, negative faith though it be. For what thinking person among us has not looked about himself and seen the fascists, apes, and thugs who have inherited the earth and not at one time or another contemplated suicide? So that ultimately suicide becomes merely one’s eloquent and dramatic way of announcing one will not live in a world controlled by goons.

  Abruptly I found myself fiercely smothering my mouth with the palm of my hand to repress the uproarious laughter welling up within me, a laughter I feared would waken the old lady in the adjoining bed. Suddenly I recalled something rd read about Gunsmoke. Some years back Big Jim’s show had been suffering anemic audience ratings and was taken from the air for a couple of seasons. Then a Madison Avenue genius suggested what the obvious problem was. Gunsmoke had had a 10 P.M. time slot, and the suave merchandiser decided that, like Matt himself, his audience had all grown feeble with the times. We were all suffering from our maladies, “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” diabetes, piles, kidney stones, anxious bladders, cardiac trouble, prostate difficulty, discharging vaginas, ulcers, cancer, apoplexy, stroke, dementia, palsy, cabin fever, eczema, prickly heat, gout, general lassitude, heartbreak, manginess, morbidness, dyspepsia, squeamishness, paranoia, droopiness, chronic bronchitis, alcoholism, constipation, indolence, gastritis, circulatory problems, diarrhea, flatulence, laryngitis, biliousness, biliary calculus, varicose veins, graveyard cough, and the weariness of middle age, and that therefore, having taken our medications and Libriums, we were all comfy abed by 10 P.M. The thing to do, the Madison Avenue bright boy reasoned to the network moguls, was to reschedule the show to 8 P.M. and an hour we decrepit old farts could still keep our eyes open. It was funny, very funny indeed. Not only did the oldsters flock back to Dodge City and the Long Branch Saloon in droves, but a whole generation of youth discovered Matt, Kitty, Doc, and Festus!

  Try as I would, though, to keep my mind from the Brigadier, I found I could not do so. The first time I ever saw Gunsmoke had been in the Brigadier’s company. It was in his modest red brick home in Baltimore, not far from Fort Holabird, where as a captain he was teaching in that installation’s top secret intelligence center and where he always maintained (facetiously one hopes) that West Pointers were his most intractable pupils. It must have been in 1957, for his son was still crawling around the living room carpeting in a baby-blue jumper suit with those built-in stockings to keep the feet warm. At the time I was doing my drunken “on the road” ramble, was on my way to Florida, and within months would be committed to an insane asylum and begin my three years in and out of those quaint places. The Brigadier sat in his easy chair, his shoes and necktie off, the silver bars of his captaincy pinned to the collar of his khaki shirt, an Antonio y Cleopatra in his mouth, his hair shorn close to his skull in the way of the lifer.

  At ten o’clock he asked if I wanted to see Gunsmoke. When I said I knew nothing about the show and didn’t care one way or another, the Brigadier expressed surprise until I explained that my moving about so much prevented my knowing hardly anything about TV. We watched together, the Brigadier, his wife and me. At the black-and-white climax, for the world was black and white in those days, Marshal Dillon had three young, mean, and scurvy hooligans with blotchy beards and crazy wild eyes—sort of youthful Jack Elam types—backed up against the side of a weather-beaten stable and petulantly debating whether or not to draw on him. At that moment, very evenly, in complete control, Big Jim issued his deadly menacing plea to the young thugs.

  “Don’t make me kill you, boys.”

  To this the Brigadier laughingly allowed, “They will. They’ll make Big Matt kill them!” And sure enough, one of them went for his gun, and in less than a hotdamn Mistuh Dillon had cleared his holster and bam, bam, bam—wow! turning two of their number completely round and knocking the third back into the stable’s facade with a force suggesting he’d been struck full in the face with Babe Ruth’s outsized bat. When the smoke settled, the three miscreants lay piled up in a mound, limp and dead as mutton. Until that moment I had no idea of the violence being shown on TV and came unstrung, thinking the scene disarmingly powerful. Then I became aware of the Brigadier’s wild mocking laughter.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “So funny? See that goddamn Colt .45 cannon Big Matt is using? In those days you’d have been lucky to hit Fatty Arbuckle the lengt
h of the bar in the Long Goddamn Branch Saloon. That cannon was about as accurate as a goddamn BB gun. And none of that shooting from the hip bullshit. You’d better hold that baby with both hands or you’d break your mother wrist. Worse than that, for Christ’s sake, Big Jim would have to be using black powder cartridges^—white powder didn’t even come in until i8god-damn93!—and every time you fired those goddamn black powder babies you were all but overwhelmed with clouds of black soot. After the first shot you were lucky if you could see anything and even luckier if you didn’t blow off your own goddamn kneecap!”

  Having always known weapons, the Brigadier doubtless knew what he was talking about. It was then that the Serax took me all the way down. When the desk rang the room at 5:30 in the morning, the boob tube was still on but nothing emanated from it but a hum and a bright, bright ray of rectangular light. Laughing, I supposed this was the brightest thing that ever did emanate from the TV.

  4

  Until one has crossed the continent and half the Pacific with an aging and ailing mother, a woman twice widowed, a woman who nightly peruses her Bible and accepts literally the three score and ten years meted man by that book, a woman not uncognizant of having buried two spouses and now en route to lay to rest her eldest progeny, a woman doubtless mightily distressed at the unfairness of the Brigadier’s being taken at forty-six and perhaps even chagrined and perplexed that her Bible had seemed to betray her, until one has made such a forlorn pilgrimage one can never truly comprehend the absurdity of what tiie phrasemakers call the Jet Age.

  The two-hour-and-twenty-minute flight from Syracuse to O’Hare International was pleasant and uneventful enough. Presently the captain, soothingly voiced, came onto the loudspeaker. He told us the altitude at which we would fly, twenty-six thousand feet. He announced our arrival time in Chicago, 8:20 Central Standard Time. He informed us that Chicago’s temperature was in the low twenties, which, having lived in Chicago and knowing that city’s winds are no myth, I knew would chill to the marrow. As unflappable as a waiter at Le Pavilion, the captain said a fine snow was falling in Chicago and that the runways were “a bit slick.”

  “But,” he hastened to add, “it’s really nothing to worry about.”

  From me there issued a wheezing silent chuckle. If, I thought, there was nothing to fret about, why had the captain bothered to describe the condition of the runways? What pompous asses these commercial airline pilots had become over the years. Without doubt the captain was let

  ting us peons in steerage know that we were in good hands, was assuring us, his palms and fingers cupped together lovingly upward, that we were “in good hands with American.” For those of us whose childhoods had been spent in thrall to the comic books, the captain was that Smiling Jack who would get us through.

  There was a distinction. Whereas my beloved Jack (I had a latent thing for Jack!) wore his captain’s hat tilted rakishly to the side of his head, sported a white silk scarf which flew freely behind him in the propeller’s furious draft, and wore, unzippered, one of those magnificent World War II leather army air force jackets (collector’s items now) and always confronted the great inimical world with a large toothy Hemingway grin, my guy now up on the flight deck had grown dignified and somber (doubtless with the times) and wore his hat squarely on his dome. His white shirt was starched, impeccably knotted his black tie. His midnight-blue uniform, adorned with all those impressive hash marks signifying god-only-knows how many years and air hours, was custom cut. His shoes were immaculately shined to a sedate funereal black. One knew, too, that the captain never smiled. The task at hand was too awesome for that. For this reason, let us set his noble jaw more along the lines of Jack’s brother-in-thralldom, Dick Tracy. By passengers, by first officers, by navigators, by engineers, by flight attendants he was supplicatingly deferred to. In the steerage section we exulted as the captain strolled chivalrously back from his flight deck, patted us comfortingly on the back, and in his correct masculine-timbered voice assured us that Everything Was Under Control.

  In faraway motel rooms of Hong Kong, Istanbul, Rome, and Paris, even I’d guess in Mayor Daley’s Chicago and the Waikiki Beach to which we now flew, the captain lay supine on beige bedspreads erupting into the hot moist mouths of lovely young attendants, those glorified and somehow touching hash slingers of the heavens. For who needed the captain more avidly than they? Hadn’t stewardesses above all bought the entire dreary American mythology; and if, instead of being pawed by all those drunken humorless married electronic parts salesmen, if one day the young Aga Khan (one of their sisters had snared no less than Henry Fonda!) was to step into their cabin, take one look, and have his heart flip over, wasn’t it compelling, nay, imperative that the captain get these hopeful young women back to the Big Apple, Chi, and Frisco that they might be primped and poised for the Khan on the next flight?

  “Jack, sweetheart,” says I, “you bring this crate nice and comfy down on those icy runways of O’Hare and I myself will suck your cock. For fact, baby.”

  On boarding in Syracuse, the cabin had been all but empty and to give each other legroom the old lady and I had taken seats on either side of the aisle. I did not talk with her. Her white head lay rigidly back against her seat. She had a tremendous dread of flying and was, perhaps, praying. In terribly strained repose her face looked more drawn and ancient than ever, a death mask. In one of the satchels beneath her seat—somewhere among the Croghan bolognas and Heath cheeses—she had bottles and bottles of her various medicines, including some Demerol the doctor had cautioned against taking until we had changed planes in Chicago. Now shaking the old lady’s shoulder with gingerish tact, the attendant jumped back in alarm at the jack-in-the-box release with which the old lady sprang up.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” the old lady said. She laughed by way of apology.

  I had to laugh, too. It was as if the old lady expected to be told we were already making our descent into Honolulu. I had two cups of black coffee, the old lady had hers black, too, along with an emetic-looking great round orange pastry, which looked to me rather like one of those novelty store rubber puddles of puke practical jokers stick on the bar next to one’s drink when one repairs to the pissoir. I didn’t suggest as much to the old lady. Presently the captain was back on the intercom informing us that if we looked off to our right we could see Buffalo. Two or three people forward in the cabin, not seated at window seats, rose, slid between vacant chairs, and—I wish I were kidding—actually looked down on Buffalo.

  Later, with a change of crew in Chicago for the direct flight to Honolulu, the new captain, sounding perfectly interchangeable with the one now up on the flight deck, would be yapping all the way across the western half of America, directing our attention to the headwaters of the Mississippi, the Continental Divide, certain peaks of the Rocky Mountains, whatever, never desisting until he pointed out an island some distance off the Pacific Coast which, thank the amenities, he said would be the last land we saw until we were making our descent into Honolulu, at which time the “big island,” as it is called, of Hawaii, Molokai, beautiful Maui (where Charles Lindbergh chose to be buried), and the “pineapple island” of Lanai would come into view. Naturally San Francisco had been fogged and clouded in, and the captain had reached a kind of 1984 screwballness when he announced that though that hilly city by the bay couldn’t be seen, if we looked down we could see the clouds blanketing that metropolis resting so placidly and smugly atop the San Andreas Fault, its inhabitants waiting in blissful obliviousness for that fog-enshrouded, gourmet-favored, cable-car fairyland to come tumbling down upon their Mickey Mouse skulls. All sorts of madmen would literally jump up and look down at the clouds below which, the captain had assured us, San Francisco sat.

  In the utterly unlikely event I’d wanted to see clouds covering San Francisco, I’d have been unable to do so—as the reader shall soon see with our change of planes in Chicago, after which I’d be all but trapped in my s
eat. It was bad enough that in their attempt to take care of our most whimsical needs, attendants were overtrained to a near compulsion to slobber all over and drown one in vats of lachrymose smiles, now the captain had been rendered a Donald Duck tour guide director! But Buffalo at eight o’clock in the morning? I wouldn’t be chauffeur-driven around that ghetto-ridden, factory-sated, pollution-enshrouded cesspool of a city at eight in the morning in a Mercedes 600, a curtain drawn discreetly between chauffeur-guide-coolie and me, a Playboy centerfold giving me head in the back seat.

  In Chicago the old lady and I were spared the chill by one of those Brobdingnagian accordionlike hallways that snake out like tentacles of some undersea monster, are clamped to the cabin’s exit, and allow the passenger to step out and walk into the terminal through a red-carpeted enclosure. The flight was ten minutes late, but we were already into the American spoke of O’Hare, did not have to clear security again, and after inquiring and being told from what gate the 9 A.M. flight to Honolulu departed, had to walk only a short distance.

  At the boarding counter I presented both our tickets and was asked whether we wanted the smoking or nonsmoking sections. When I, in turn, asked if the flight was crowded, I was told it was running “very light.” In that case we’d take two in the smoking section on either side of the aisle from one another. Explaining the old lady had suffered a stroke and had a bad heart, I told him that with her medication she might, with legroom, be able to sleep the nine hours to Honolulu. The guy said he was sure she would.