Last Notes from Home

by Frederick Exley

  “You must be one of the six guys who did read it,” I said.

  Toby laughed, then remained silent for a long time. Finally he said, “You wanna get laid?”

  “You and me?”

  “No, not you and me, you asshole!”

  Toby again laughed and for the first time looked at me.

  “Okay, then.”

  For the first time I found myself seated in the deep blue leather bucket seat of the Ass. At eighty miles an hour Toby drove the two-lane Route 12 upriver to Clayton and parked the car behind O’Brien’s Hotel, a watering hole for the younger crowd. When I opened the door and started to climb out, Toby said there was no need for my doing that. Inquiring if I shouldn’t go in, meet the girl he had in mind for me, and observe the amenities by at least buying her a single drink, Toby said there was booze at the camp where we were going and not to sweat about getting laid.

  ‘These cunts do what I tell ‘em to do.”

  8

  On returning with the girls, Toby introduced them as Corrine and Vivian.

  “Vivian’s yours.”

  Toby told them to sit in back on the cramped blue leather jump seat. Both were quite pretty but neither particularly striking. What they had was youth, neither appearing to be much more than twenty, and youth always has its magnetizing effect on middle age. Toby drove to what he claimed was a “borrowed,” beautifully furnished camp at Millen’s Bay. As the night chill had come in off the St. Lawrence, Toby lighted the pilot light of a gas furnace in the living room, got both Vivian and me a bottle of Heineken from the kitchen refrigerator, and took Corrine immediately to a bedroom off the living room, closing the door behind him. Vivian and I drank two bottles of beer and talked. The ambiance was so throbbing with awkwardness—already pleasurable mating noises emanated from the bedroom—I remember very little of what I said. Vivian was attractive in a buxom, dark-eyed, and pouty-lipped way. She said she’d been a nurse at Watertown’s House of the Good Samaritan (“Good Sam”) for three years, which happily put her a few years past twenty. What she said next was not destined to make me happy. Vivian said her father had been a high school classmate of mine! She said he hadn’t liked A Fan’s Notes—”your book”—because he hadn’t liked the “bad language” and really hadn’t understood it but that he remembered me fondly as a jock.

  “He said you played center on one of the great Water-town High School football teams. He said you were even better in basketball.”

  I do recall what I then said.

  “Pure nostalgia.” (Banal and sham modesty in my manly utterance.) “I’m unequivocally certain that the kids of your generation are bigger, faster, and more aggressive than we ever dreamed of being.” I was pensive for many moments, trying unsuccessfully to rebuke myself for my predicament. “I wish you hadn’t told me about your father. Not about his not liking the book. I don’t like it either. About being a classmate. It makes it rather—?”

  “Crummy?”

  “And sleazy and discomforting and sort of incestuous. Yeah, deed it do. Deed it do sound crummy.”

  “Don’t worry about it. If it makes any difference, I won’t tell you my last name. Not that you’d remember my jerk father anyway. Besides, he gave up—ha, ha—on me ages ago! As if there was anything special to give up on! In the age of the pill and the IUD! As if I was into anything all that monstrous, anything everyone else isn’t into.” Vivian did an ugh. “That drunken self-righteous slob!”

  On finishing her second Heineken, Vivian entered a bedroom on the opposite side of the living room from the one Toby and Corrine had entered. She left the door ajar. On finishing two more Heinekens, I entered the room and closed the door, feeling sad, as heavy as an ogre, and about as unclean. I undressed and slipped stealthily into the bed next to a naked Vivian. Pale light from a near-full moon came in a window and during interim respites, while Vivian poutily slept, I scrupulously studied her face, trying to call back that of a high school classmate’s. I had no luck. Fucking Vivian I would ask her if I were her daddy and Vivian would say that yes and yes and yes I was her daddy!

  In the next weeks Toby fixed me up a dozen times in the same way, though on each occasion we went to different bars to pick up different girls (perfectly interchangeable, however) and different domiciles to copulate, to farmhouses in Rutland or Copenhagen or Burrville, to cottages in Adams Cove or Cape Vincent or Hammond, to apartments in Gouverneur or Mannsville or Pulaski. What invariably startled and distressed me was that, though the owners were never in residence, the places always appeared to have been vacated only moments before. Dirty dishes were piled in sinks. In bathroom baskets were recently used Kleenex. Medicine cabinets were full. Fresh puddles lay on the floor of tiled shower stalls, the nozzles still dripping, hairs like question marks beneath the water. Damp limp bath towels hung yet on racks. Once, logs were still smoldering in a stranger’s fireplace. When I later learned that Toby and Farr were one, I told him with great and aggravated earnestness that I hoped he wasn’t intimidating anyone into clearing out of his own goddamn house just so we could get laid.

  “My word, no! These people are my friends!”

  As far as I knew, Toby had no friends but me. On discovering Toby and Farr were one, I had a stock reply whenever the girls on the jump seat asked our destination.

  **To one of Toby’s safe houses”

  Toby always laughed and exclaimed, “You goddamn fool!”

  At seven one night Toby climbed to my attic studio and told me he wanted to take me to a new place down around North Syracuse. After the name of the play it was called The Devil Made Me Do It. Toby’d heard that “the cunts are swinging from the rafters” and wanted to have a “look-see” for himself. Toby had no girls lined up, but who knew? I declined, explaining close friends had been vacationing in the Bay for a week and that, though Budweiser had carried me well enough for two days, I’d spent the rest of the week swilling vodka.

  “As I get older I find it increasingly difficult to get off the sauce. I’ve had the gruesome wild willies all day, just quieted down after supper a few minutes ago. Now you expect me to start all over again. Cmon, Toby, be a friend!”

  Toby told me not to fret. He’d give me some pills. I should take one before I went to sleep and he guaranteed I’d wake without any nervousness whatever. He told me to get an empty aspirin or prescription bottle or “even a fucking envelope will do.” In the upstairs bathroom I found one of the old lady’s empty brown plastic prescription containers. It had one of those new tops that are supposed to prevent three-year-olds from ODing. (Without a great deal of sweat and cursing, the only ones who can fathom the opening’s intricacies are three-year-olds!) Instead of traveling west to Interstate 81, Toby first drove east on Walton Street, turned northeast on the Goose Bay Road, and went up past the golf course. In a small dell the other side of the course, just before one again turns left on the road running to Dingman Point, there is an abandoned dirt road which runs unimpeded for thirty feet and then is lost in high reedy swamp grass and bramble bush. Toby drove right into the grass and when he braked and put the Ass in park, the reedy grass was swishing harshly at the windows on either side of the car. Getting out, Toby lay on his back in the stiff pulpous grass and pulled himself beneath the car, reappearing almost instantly. As though we were kids exchanging jelly beans, he let the red and white capsules sift sievelike through the bottom of his fist into my cupped palm.

  “Take one tonight. You’ll sleep the sleep of the innocent. If you can’t sleep for the next couple nights, take a couple more. But do not—I repeat, do not—continue taking them and drinking. These babies are heavy, love. Thirty milligrams. About twenty will take you all the way, right up to see Big Daddy in the sky.”

  Dr. Toby was dispensing clinical wisdom.

  “What are they?”

  “Something new. Serax. In fact, they’re using them mainly on drunks like yourself. Only known side effects are possible skin rashes, perhaps a little nervousness in your bladder. Migh
t cause a little fluttering in the kidneys and you’ll be ah-drip-dripping into your jockeys. I myself am not much into the evil pills. Occasionally if I don’t feel like grass, I pop one of these and put a couple Joni Mitchell albums on the stereo. Great dreamy soothing fucking or masturbating time listening to Mitchell on these.”

  Oddly, I did not even then equate Toby and Farr.

  The Devil Made Me Do It was packed. Toby elbowed me a place at the far end of the bar next to the section piped off for waitresses serving tables on the floor, laid a fifty on the bar, ordered a Heineken, and told the bartender to “give my gramps here some vodka on the rocks with a touch of tonic, no fruit.” Two big construction guys stood next to us at the bar. They still wore their dusty orange hard hats. Their khaki shirts, trousers, and hands were covered with the grime of their day’s labor. Live country-and-western music emanated from a dance hall hard by the bar and lounge. Nobody looked over thirty save the hard hats and me. Doubtless they’d started drinking at the five o’clock whistle, had got drunk, and now found themselves caught up among the younger nocturnal crowd. The one closest to me really enjoyed Toby’s calling me gramps. With him it apparently passed for wit incarnate. He slammed the bar with the palm of his big dirty right hand, giggled coarsely, pointed a stubby index finger at me, and spoke to Toby.

  “Izzee really your gramps? Izzee really your gramps?”

  Paying him no more attention than he paid any other stranger, Toby started circulating among the tables in the lounge. The hard hat was very put off. Into Toby’s appearance he misread the effeminacy I have remarked. He let his dusty knobby hand go limp at the wrist, and for his partner affected a lisp.

  “Oh me, oh my. Ithent he some kinda pretheus Ivy League queen?”

  Toby wandered from table to table, pulling up at those occupied by unescorted girls. Toby was doing what he did best when the spirit moved him—exuding charm. From those tables came squeals of high shrill girlish laughter. One had to hand it to Toby. He was good, as good as I’d ever seen. When at length he smilingly started walking back toward me, I thought he’d settled on two and was going to fetch me to join them. Instead he told me he had to drive into the heart of Syracuse to the Presidential Plaza Apartments (high rent) and “see someone on personal business.” He’d be gone only an hour and did I mind waiting?

  When four hours had elapsed and Toby still hadn’t appeared, I was inebriated and extremely agitated. The hard hats had become obnoxiously drunk and were baiting me constantly.

  “Hey, gramps, where’d your pretty-boy grandson go?”

  “Hey, bartender, give ol’ gramps here another drink!”

  “Hey, gramps, aren’t yuh gonna buy one back?”

  In a depressingly ostentatious attempt to display their affluence and outdo each other, they had already bought one another so many they had a half dozen full bottles of Ginny backed up before them on the bar, growing warm and flat.

  “Look, I’m trying to mind my own business. I didn’t ask you to buy me a drink. I don’t want you buying me drinks!”

  “Well, gramps, if you wanna be a cheapo, we’ll buy the fuckin’ drinks anyway.”

  Finally, in exasperation, and because the bar was still so crowded, I asked the bartender if he’d watch my drink and save my place at the bar. He said he would but recommended I take my change with me, the dwindling change from Toby’s fifty. To my astonishment the Ass was still parked in the back lot in the precise spot we’d left it! Bringing my hands up to my temples like horse blinders, I brought my nose up to the glass, looked into the front seat, then into the back seat. Toby wasn’t there. Now I did the same thing with every blessed vehicle in the parking lot. The only people I found were a couple kids copulating in a Volkswagen camper. The camper had curtains, but apparently the kids’ anxiety hadn’t allowed time to close them. The guy wasn’t Toby. Bewildered and despondently alarmed, I walked slowly back into the bar.

  At five minutes before closing time Toby appeared all smiles, profusely apologetic and sanguine with some cockamamie tale of having to drive his “personal business” friend over to Fulton and back, a matter of great urgency.

  “Life and death, baby. I wanted to call you but couldn’t find anything listed for this dump.”

  The hard hat nearest to us rose up from his stupor, put his heavy dirty arm around the shoulder of the inky-blue V-necked cashmere sweater Toby wore over his golf shirt.

  Toby spoke with deadly even menace.

  “Take your fucking grubby paws off me.”

  “Oh, my, pretty boy’s a tough guy. And, yeah, so does an elephant piss lemonade.”

  The hard hat closed his arm around Toby’s neck in a mock-furious wrestler’s hold. It happened with such shocking celerity I could not take it in completely, rather as if it were the projected images of a movie camera gone mad. Toby hit him only—I think—twice. He hit him first flush on the nose, out of which there gushed immediately a profusion of thick rich-red blood. With his right fist Toby next connected viciously to the guy’s left jaw, I heard something snap, hoping it wasn’t Toby’s hand (it wasn’t), and the hard hat settled ever so slowly down on his hands and knees, then to all fours. He remained that way shaking his head as if his skull were underwater. The snaking didn’t so much reflect his awesome disbelief and chagrin at what had happened as it seemed to express a reflexive twitch, as though his temple had been grazed by the lead of a .50-caliber shell and he were waiting horrified for death.

  By now the bar had completely emptied except for the four of us and the bartender. The latter had pulled the zinc trash cans full of empty bottles from beneath the folding service bar, had lidded them, and they now rested at the nape of my knees behind me. He was obviously going to take them out back at our exiting the bar. He stood as stunned as I did. The other hard hat, though terribly drunk, too, was much bigger than the first, his gnarled dirty hands from wrist to clinched fist looking somewhat like moldy overgrown zucchinis. As he lunged furiously toward Toby, Toby grabbed a lid from one of the garbage cans, turned it so he gripped it by its edge, then swung it high over his head and brought it so ferociously down on the man’s head (he’d made the mistake of setting his hard hat on the bar) that Toby seemed to leave the floor and the metallic sound of lid against head seemed as someone hitting a great Oriental gong with a sledgehammer. Now the hard hat settled slowly to his knees, at which time Toby kicked him violently in his heavy belly, and immediately the guy also went to a doglike all fours, perfectly juxtaposed with his friend, and was throwing up puddles of sickish bile-looking Ginny. Now Toby did an unforgivable thing. With his heavy Scotch-grained custom-made right shoe he kicked the first to go down in the ribs, and I definitely heard something snap. With amazing swiftness he moved behind the other and with equal fury kicked him high on the bottom, right at the coccyx, causing him to topple over and settle face down in his own nauseating emissivity. The room had started going round and round on me—I was becoming sick myself. I was so petrified I was unable to move, and Toby had to take me firmly by the arm and drag me to the Ass. Behind us an equally amazed bartender issued an ironically meek “Hey, Jesus.” Toby said, “Don’t follow us to the parking lot or you’ll get worse. Like maybe your fucking head blown off.”

  Of course I knew who Toby was then. But I didn’t say anything until we were halfway home on Interstate 81. My face was red with embarrassment and chagrin that it had taken me so long to put Toby and Farr together. When we had gone on our erotic outings (“people said Fair seduced any girl he wanted to seduce”), I’d noticed, the following mornings, when Toby and I and the girls were lolling about the cottages in our underwear, how surprisingly muscular and well built Toby was (the Giants were to make a corner-back of him), a physique which had been disguised by the formal cut of his Ivy League duds. As Rizzuto is reported to have said of Mantle, “He grows bigger as he undresses.” I didn’t say anything for a long time because it also took a long time for Toby’s anger to abate. His right hand was hurting him badly and
he kept removing it from the wheel and shaking it as if to prevent swelling. When at length he slid a Stevie Wonder tape into the slot beneath the dash and was driving with his “wounded” hand, was humming and keeping time to the music by tapping the palm of his left hand against the wooden wheel, I spoke.

  “I got to tell yuh, Toby. You’re the meanest son of a bitch I ever saw. The quickest too. And the fucking most violent. It wasn’t in the least necessary to administer those final coups de grace by kicking those slobs.”

  Toby laughed loudly. “The devil made me do it.” Now he fell silent and grew solemn. “You’re a sucker. Don’t you understand about pigs like that? They were determined to get it—begging for it. If I hadn’t done it for them, they’d have ended by pounding the piss out of each other. Disgusting fucking pigs, the long and the short of it.” Toby paused and smiled. “As to my being violent, my dad told me he only ever met one guy tougher.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Your dad.”

  “Your father knew my father?”