Last Notes from Home

by Frederick Exley

  Nor did I know that directly after the funeral we’d repair to O’Twoomey’s second-floor suite in the original part of the Royal Hawaiian, where my best friend, Toby Farquarson III, from Alexandria Bay, or wherever he was from (no one was ever quite certain), would immediately hit it off with O’Twoomey—at their first meeting at the suite they were huddled whispering in a corner—or that O’Twoomey would not return to Dublin with his Hospital Trusts pilgrims and would instead stay on Oahu. For whatever knavery on which he was embarked, he hired Toby to work for him that very day. For that reason, whenever I returned to see Robin, I would stay for a day or two at the Royal Hawaiian to see how the other half lives, as it were (O’Twoomey always picked up the bill), then go out and stay with Robin on the Cirrhosis of the River. During my stays with her, we would always take the time to make the thirty-minute flight to Lanai and spend three or four days with Malia and Wiley. One night on the Cirrhosis Robin introduced a subject that led me indirectly to telling her why I had been forced to cut Wiley from my life.

  At supper Robin brought up a matter that was causing her considerably more anguish than it was causing me: my drinking. Each time she brought up alcohol and lolled it around on her palate as lovingly as if it were a delicious piece of gossip about a movie actor’s recondite sexual habits, she’d ghoulishly apologize and solemnly swear never to mention booze again, only to bring it up two nights later. It was as if she saw vodka as the obstacle in what might otherwise be a blissfully beau-ideal relationship. On this night, obviously piqued at having flogged her subject to death, at having explored all its avenues, byways, nooks, and crannies, oh, its obscurist tributaries, at having exhausted her subject with such devotion I was on the verge of booting her in the behind and she damn well knew it, Robin leaped in one breathtakingly absurd moment from the conclusion that I was a hopeless drunk to the idea that I wasn’t in any way an alcoholic.

  “Christ, Ex, I’ve seen you drink a quart of vodka a day for days at a time, then one morning just get bored or whatever, get up and walk ten or twelve miles on the beach and go off the booze cold turkey. I mean, drunks start talking to the dicky birds, have to be lugged to the heebie-jeebie ward on a stretcher, and get massive intravenous doses of B12 and God-only-knows-what-all medications. You don’t have to do that. You’ll concede me that?”

  “It’s something I learned from a guy a long time ago.” “You mean like a guru or holy man or priest or Hare Krishna or someone like that?”

  I laughed. “Yeah, Robin, someone like that.” My guru was our high school coach. Although we had a parochial school in Watertown, if one wanted to play football and basketball against the Syracuse and Buffalo schools, against those in Utica, Albany, Schenectady, Bing-hamton, Rochester, Elmira, Rome, White Plains, Erie, Pennsylvania (once even Clearwater, Florida), one had no choice but to enroll in Watertown High School and pay the exacting price demanded by the coach, a big, brawny, handsome, tawny-skinned, cigar-chomping, awe-inspiring Woody Hayes type who struck rigidity not only into his players but also into the other students and even his fellow faculty members. With the exception of a half dozen more principled teachers, in whose classes we were cautioned against enrolling, he was perfectly capable of having marks upgraded to keep his needed jocks—he didn’t worry about Nixon-like third-stringers—in uniform. The distaff teachers were so much putty in the coach’s hands. He was not only bright, intimidating, and handsome, he could be extremely gracious, and he did not hesitate to use that charm to his advantage.

  He was also a gifted enough coach to be on palsy terms with Notre Dame’s Frank Leahy. At a football seminar held in the Adirondacks at the coach’s summer boarding camp for affluent kids, Leahy gave him the T formation, which he promptly introduced in the prehistoric year of 1943. Thus for six, seven, eight years, well into the 1950s for that matter, Watertown played against single- and double-wing formation teams that hadn’t the foggiest notion what we were doing on offense. He had not only varsities and junior varsities, he had junior junior varsities. He did not call them that; he called them the North and South Junior High School teams. He gave these coaches his T formation playbook and conned the Frontier League, made up of smaller high schools in the surrounding area (including Alexandria Bay, where I now live), into accepting Watertown’s junior high schools into their midst. Thus we thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-olds, just the far side of puberty and not really physically ready, were learning the coach’s plays and competing against—and, more often than otherwise, beating—seventeen- and eighteen-year-old juniors and seniors. By the time we moved into the tenth grade and the old high school on Sterling Street and on to either the junior varsity or varsity—the latter if we were very, very good or very, very lucky—that is, by the time we moved into the coach’s imposing presence, we not only knew his playbook, we had had our physical baptisms against much larger, much stronger boys. Even that did not prepare us for the price the coach would exact.

  He did not hesitate to put his hands on his players. Laughingly—I say laughingly now—I recall his once stopping a scrimmage when our starting right tackle missed a blocking assignment, taking the left end instead of crossing over and taking the right linebacker. The coach whistled the scrimmage dead, nonchalantly walked over to the right tackle, unsnapped and removed the right tackle’s helmet. In embarrassment, we all stared at the cleated grass. A stunning, hallowed silence whistled around the Knickerbocker practice field. The coach raised his doubled fist high and with seemingly savage fury brought the heel of his fist smack down atop our right tackle’s dome. Today I’m sure the coach didn’t hit our right tackle hard; in fact, with his absurdly histrionic sense he pulled that punch. It was as if he were trying to get a comic strip light bulb to glitter poppingly above our right tackle’s head that the tackle might get the idea of the coach’s maxim: Every play is a touchdown if properly executed. Nonchalantly, the coach replaced our right tackle’s helmet and snapped it firmly on his chin. Nonchalantly, he told us to run the play again.

  We did. He told us to run it again. We did. He told us to run it again and again and again. This was in September before Daylight Saving Time had changed to Eastern Standard Time, and the coach made us run that accursed play into dusk and then turned on the klieg lights and made us run it more. By then the coach and his covey of assistants were standing beyond the range of our blinded visions, beyond the lighted practice area, laughing and joking, the kind of laughter that suggested they were swapping raunchy jokes. We were almost sure they weren’t even watching us, but how could we be absolutely certain? So the hitting and the hurting and the thirst and the exhaustion went on.

  When at last the coach blew his whistle and bellowed “enough,” it wasn’t enough. He ordered us to run four laps around the quarter-mile track encircling the field, then run the half mile up Thompson Boulevard to the field house, take our showers, and get some sleep. Directly the coach departed with his laughing assistants. We did our four laps, ritualistically removed our cleats, tied their strings together, threw them over our shoulder pads so we wouldn’t leave cleat marks on the lawns of the upper-middle-class homes along Thompson Boulevard, and, too weary to run another ten steps, strolled slowly in our stocking feet, heads downward in embarrassment and tiredness, moving in and out of the light and shadows of streetlamps. Vividly I recall our right tackle’s saying, “Sorry guys, sorry guys, sorry guys,” and our replying, “Screw it,” and “So you blew one,” and “What’s the diff?” and “It could happen to anyone.” But who would ever miss another assignment? Well, I would. But that is only incidental to this tale.

  Abruptly we heard a car’s brakes screech to a halt behind us. Turning in panic at the sound of the careening rocking vehicle, we saw the coach emerging from his station wagon. Did we call this running? The coach removed the belt from his pants, left his wagon idling smack in the middle of the boulevard, and doing his Mr. Hyde laugh, chased us along the macadam, with his wide leather belt lashing out at the slower-moving buttocks all t
he way into the locker room. That was one of the half-dozen nights during my football and basketball days under the coach when I put my head down on my folded arms and fell into the stolid sleep of utter fatigue while my mother was re-warming a supper eaten hours earlier by the rest of the family. So bad was it on this night she could not even rouse me until 3 A.M., when she again tried to feed me. But I waved the food scornfully away and barely struggled up the stairs and into bed, while the old lady in her housecoat stood at the bottom of the staircase and moved me on with a whispered hand-wringing litany of “Dear, dear, dear, dear.”

  Was it worth it all? To this day I don’t honestly know. I do know that we won and we won and we won. I also know that to win and to win and to win leaves little time for anything or anyone else, including Wiley. I did not learn to play a musical instrument or join the glee club. After that Stetsoned son of the prairie I’d produced in kindergarten, I never did another watercolor. I never tried out for the school play. Even today my ignorance of music appalls me. Writing a speech for President Reagan would be beyond me. I could list the gaps in my education until the reader slumbered. One might well ask, then, if being a jock cost me so dearly in other disciplines, why my feelings are in the least ambivalent. When after World War II we arrived in the presence of the coach, his whole bearing tacitly articulated to his players what he doubtless could not have put into words: Listen to me. Do what I ask. Give me your regard. And I in turn shall show you the way to the world’s regard.

  “How could you learn anything from a tyrant like that?” Robin said. “And I don’t see the bloody relationship between going cold turkey and that bully.” Of course Robin knew everything about the Depression, to which we players had been born, from her father and couldn’t comprehend the “abhorrent ambivalence” that forced us old farts into speaking of a period of “economic deprivation”—academic claptrap—with such loving and mawkish sentimentality.

  In my senior year, I told Robin, as starting offensive center and, depending upon who was hurt, either nose guard or linebacker on defense, I cost Watertown an undefeated season. In our fourth game at Auburn High School in galelike winds and rain, I was called for holding on their one-yard line on fourth down. We scored, had the play nullified, were penalized fifteen yards, and on the replay from sixteen yards out, we failed to put the ball in. In eight games that year, I continued, though I suspected I myself was talking to the dicky birds by then, Watertown scored 157 points and gave up twelve. “Imagine!” Six out of eight teams we goose-egged. We took our opener 21-6, our second game 41-0. Each week awards were presented to both the outstanding defensive and offensive players, the prize being a free steak and spaghetti dinner at the New Parrot Restaurant. After the 41-0 game, when I won the defensive award, the coach suspended the prizes, saying our defense was so good the award should have gone to the entire defensive unit, which would have cost the owner of the New Parrot, our line coach, Jake DeVito, a small fortune in T-bones and pasta.

  “Still, Robin, I got mine. And you know what? That was the best meal I ever ate!”

  “Jesus, Ex!”

  Because our third game was at Rome Free Academy under the lights on a Friday night, the coaches from the five teams remaining on our schedule were in the stands scouting us. We won 21-0, and the next morning we picked up the newspaper to learn that Dave Powers of Oswego—he was this venerable white-haired dude who’d been coaching upstate forever—was quoted as saying we were the best high school football team he’d seen in ten, maybe twenty damn years. I sighed. “Boy, was Auburn waiting for us.”

  Rising to my feet, slightly inebriated, I assumed the offensive center’s stance and tried to tell Robin what had happened at Auburn. The winds precluded our even trying our passing game, which was great. The water was ankle deep, so running the ends would have been blatant wantonness; even off-tackle plays turned out to be reckless shilly-shallying. In the end, losing 6-0, we drove downfield “right off the cheeks of my ass.” Slapping my right haunch, I explained to Robin that that was the “one hole,” my left haunch the “two hole” and that we marched down the field never varying from those two holes. “You know, Robin, the shortest distance between two points.” In the huddle at their one, our quarterback, Bill Reynolds—”he’s still a good friend and a hotshot trial lawyer in Buffalo”—called a forty-one on hut, and I said to myself, “No, no, no! Jesus, no, Bill. They’re going to throw their linebackers and entire secondary into those two holes.” And I was right. Snapping the ball, I just veered to my right, the “one hole,” taking as many guys as I could any way I could. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Joe Guardino break two tackles, slip past my right hip and into the end zone. Then I went to the ground and when I looked up I saw the referee throwing a white flag at my knees, grabbing his right wrist with his left hand and beginning to pump his right arm fiercely up and down.

  “That’s it, Robin. We blanked the rest of the teams on our schedule, Oswego, Massena—they came down undefeated with an all-state halfback, Gilbert “Gibby” Granger—Onondaga Valley of Syracuse, and Lackawanna of Buffalo.”

  “So every time you go straight, you’re making penance for a mistake you made in a dumb football game thirty years ago. Jesus, Ex!”

  “Not at all.”

  “If that’s not true, when you go on the wagon and start walking, you invoke some mental image of this coach that sustains you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “That’s easy. When I’m walking, I remember the coach chasing us up the street-lighted boulevard and snapping our asses with his belt. You see, Robin, he was a teacher in the true sense of the word in that he taught us all we could be someone we never thought we could be.”

  “Jesus, Exley, I swear you make me want to puke.”

  6

  If one is as amoral as I, it is little wonder that my best friend in the Bay was—1*11 call him Toby Farquarson HE, for he looks like nothing so much as a Toby Farquarson m. Toby seemed so to symbolize, nay, epitomize that younger revolutionary generation relentlessly committed (armed conflict if necessary) to a confrontation with the Establishment, that from the moment I learned who and what he was, Toby never ceased riveting my attention, though even I was astonished that he’d shown up at the Brigadier’s funeral. Toby’s revolution rose up from some dark excessively hurt and grieving place within himself, and his sometimes violent “cause” was executed in behalf of no one, absolutely no one, but Toby Farquarson III. Shortly after we met, when the front pages of every newspaper in America and Walter Cronkite and brethren were rendering us comatose (who needs Serax?) with that stultifying fairy tale “about” Ms. Patty Hearst, “about” that pompous barrister Mr. F. Lee Bailey (I could have given that emaciated poor little rich girl a better defense than he!), “about” Bill and Emily Harris and their salvaging of the Symbionese Liberation Army, I somewhat guardedly asked Toby what he thought of the entire business. Here I couldn’t resist a wry smile.

  “From a professional’s point of view?”

  We were in the Adirondacks on a snow-splotched dirt road the other side of Harrisville, one that ran by Totem Camp where the upstate affluent had used to unload their bothersome kids during the ten-week summer recess, a camp once owned by my twenty-three-years-dead high school football and basketball coach (how all these upstate locales conspire to haunt and close me in). In his deep blue leather bucket seat Toby was at the rich-looking polished wooden wheel of his sixteen-thousand-dollar 1972 Aston Martin DBS. Toby had dual points on the distributor; had added a high-output coil, modified the manifold to get exhaust in and out as quickly as possible, changed the gear ratio and cam shaft to give the vehicle a better “lift,” and bolted lead weights to the frame. With these modifications Toby claimed the car would cruise at 150 miles per hour and that no trooper in New York State could even have the Ass, as he called it, in the range of the trooper’s vision after a chase of a paltry five miles. When I responded I didn’t much care for cruising at 150 miles per hour a
nd asked how he evaded roadblocks, Toby said he never did anything “naughty” at a location where his route of flight wasn’t protected by at least a half dozen side roads, adding that he knew the precise destination of every one of these roads and the precise speed at which he could travel them.

  “Still, Toby, the Ass has absolutely to be the most watched and scrutinized vehicle in upstate New York. Don’t you think it a rather ostentatious car for a rising young man in your line of work?”

  “Jesus, Exley, sometimes I think you’re as dumb as the troopers! Only a state policeman would be thick-skulled enough to be looking for the Ass.”

  As he said this we were traveling Route 12 upriver to Clayton and passing a weather-beaten barn-red farmhouse. In the yard stood an old wooden spinning wheel and an antique wooden butter churn. In front of these a black half-inch pipe had been driven into the yard, and to the top of the pipe was attached a prepainted red-on-white FOR SALE sign of the kind bought in a five-and-dime. From the odd location of the sign one couldn’t understand if the antiques or the farm and the whole kit and caboodle were being offered up for one’s consideration. A 1970 green Ford half-ton pickup truck, all of its fenders battered and rusty, sat in the cindered drive. Toby now pointed at it.