Last Notes from Home

by Frederick Exley

  In the fall of my senior year I was, at 145 pounds, the starting center and noseguard for Watertown. Scheduled to play the Massena Red Raiders, who hadn’t been beaten in three years, our coach did not let up on me the entire week preceding the game, telling me Massena had a number of surprises in store for us and particularly for me, at 145 especially vulnerable in the offensive line. What the coach was really saying, it must be understood, was that the year before the center who had preceded me, a 190-pounder named John Barnard, had on defense continually moved from his linebacker position into the scrimmage where he so badly mauled their 150-pound center the guy was eventually removed with a broken arm. Hardly notorious for Christian amnesty, Massena, I was constantly reminded throughout the week, would deem me at my weight too defenseless to resist and would reciprocate in kind by continuing to bring the worst animal they had into the line to play off my nose and put some real hurt on me. Had the coach been the kind of psychologist who spent the week assuring me I’d be up to the challenge, I might have been okay; instead, his style was one of defiance, assuring me I hadn’t the stuff to make it and wouldn’t make a pimple on a man’s ass.

  We didn’t know how anxious the coach was until the Friday night before the game when, prior to the pep rally, he scheduled a 7 P.M. High Mass at the Holy Family Church on Winthrop Street, a ploy he used only every three or four years. Whether we were Catholic or not, we were expected to attend, those non-Romans among us taking our cues from the anointed, standing when they stood, sitting when they sat, going to our knees in the supplicatory position of prayer when they did. It was while I was in the latter position, nearing the end of the Mass when the Catholics among us had filed to the altar to receive the wafer and the wine, the flesh and blood of the Lamb, that it happened, the abrupt, unforgivable, agonizing, terrible erection, followed immediately by an ejaculation so pronounced that my whole body shuddered to an extent I all but swooned, rather as if I’d actually made contact with the Christ. As, indeed, who knows that I hadn’t?

  Literature of the malaise confirms that this emission was classic, heralded as it was by a week of threats of pain, fear of failure at public performances, fear of not being able to finish tasks, of not being ready, threats of being punished. Moreover, I filled the bill in that my erection was not induced (in my case it never was!) by what the quack psychologists call “direct sexual precipitants,” that is, I was not so hopelessly and lustfully corrupt that during that sacredly serene moment, with my teammates coming together with God to the greater glory of the Watertown Golden Cyclones (did we really call ourselves that?), there abruptly came into my thoughts the vision of a naked Ava Gardner, ivory thighs parted and a gracious hand beckoning me to umber places and a carnal knowledge of her. Oh, no, never that! What always did happen, however, was that at the first seminal discharge, a drip, a drop, there came, obliterating everything in the real world, the overpowering image of Cass on the crossbar of my bicycle, the smell of her flaxen-honey hair, the blood of shyness diffusing her lovely cheeks and throat, the outline of her new breasts directed to the wind, the exhilarating freshness she cast.

  If this, then, is a classic example of spontaneous or anxiety-related orgasm, preceded as it was by threats of pain and so forth, most of my attacks, coming at four- to six-month intervals, were so far removed from anxiety or anything I can unearth in psychological tomes as to remove me from the land of men and place me in Satanic worlds. As the reader may have guessed, these spells or lapses began within months of the time I assumed heroic stature, sped a worried Cass to the Home on my bicycle and did not end until four years later when, shortly after my desecration of the High Mass, Cass first performed fellatio on me. So unexpected were these attacks that it required a genuinely ironfisted act of willpower for me to strip myself from my football and basketball gear and step naked into the shower with my teammates.

  But, as only one example, and I could relate twenty, look at this can of worms. On Sunday nights in Watertown the high school kids used to congregate on the sidewalk in front of the Avon Theater on Arsenal Street. When the early showing let out at 8:30 or whenever, we’d all crowd through the doors discharging the six o’clock viewers, scoot like mad up the stairs and take seats in the upper balcony. Once seated, and apparently safe, we’d take stock of how many of us had been caught by the ushers, take up a collection of small change, and send someone—usually a volunteer—back to make certain everyone had enough money to get in.

  Oh, they were laughing nights, joyous even when the movie was what nowadays is called a turkey, perhaps even sillier then, for when those cynical bastards in Hollywood treated us like a bunch of limp morons, we reacted in kind, took up the challenge, we defied them, we spat in their faces, we gave them Watertown catcalls, we entered into a dialogue with the screen, we said, in effect, don’t patronize us, you phony sons of bitches. If, for example, the heroine, batting great modest eyes, said, “Do you really love me?” and the hero, played, say, by a bedimpled Richard Greene, proclaimed, “I love you more than my life,” surely one of the guys would holler, “More than your puny life, Dicky baby, is hardly enough!”

  Occasionally such a line came during a good movie, helping to break the tense obeisance we were paying the screen’s fantasy. I got off such a line just prior to one of my attacks. The movie was called The Seventh Cross. It starred Spencer Tracy and Hume Cronyn. How it would hold up today is irrelevant; if for no other reason than even as adolescents watching Tracy and Cronyn at work, we knew we were in the presence of the goods, we were rapt, we were riveted, we paid these marvelous actors the ultimate homage of our head-tilted silence. Now there came a scene where Tracy, Cronyn, and his wife are seated in the kitchen, Cronyn’s young son at distracting play. It is past the son’s bedtime. Tracy and Cronyn obviously have weighty matters to discuss, intrigues beyond comprehension, nefarious maneuvers involving courageously single-minded risks, the realignment of states, matters not for the ears of children.

  In exasperation the mother finally snaps, “Come, kiss your father good night and go to bed.” And, possessed by the perverse imps of Sunday-night Avon movie-watching, Exley cried, “Christ, if the poor kid’s gotta kiss Hume, no wonder he doesn’t want to go to bed!” In retrospect, the line does not seem that funny; but for whatever reason the high school section of the upper balcony broke up in riotous laughter. It was at the moment the hilarity crested that the erection came, the awful emission (thankfully in that darkened theater), and, from the inception of the erection and thereafter, the recurring image of Cass on the crossbar, an image, I repeat, that came only subsequent to the first stirrings in my loins. There was no anxiety whatever. And if there was, it was so deep-seated it would take a dozen Freudians twenty years to unearth it.

  2

  Until the Brigadier was fourteen or fifteen and I eleven or twelve, we slept together. Then one morning shortly before or after dawn Bill had a nocturnal emission. I know that it happened at this time because when I awoke for school, I rolled over, the warm wetness shocked my back, I leaped from bed only to stare furiously back at a contentedly sleeping Brigadier. At breakfast I did not know how to bring the subject up to my mother. It was not a question of being a tattletale, for I thought the Brigadier had wet the bed, we hadn’t to my knowledge ever had a bed wetter in the family, I understood it to be the sign of some inner distress or insecurity. I loved the Brigadier, thought he must be sick, and just before leaving for school told my mother out of solicitation that she might bring her maternal wisdom to healing him. The healing turned out to be very simple. At supper mat night we were informed that a new single bed had been added to the room, at the far end fronting the upstairs sleeping porch, and from that day forward I was to occupy that bed. It is only as I write that I smile, imagining, what with my father at work, the desperate logistical maneuvers my mother must have gone through to get a single bed into the room, sheeted, blanketed, and bedspreaded, between nine in the morning and supper time. I smile thinking of the appeals to
neighbors for help, the bartering, wondering who carried the bed upstairs, and so forth.

  If sex, then, separated the Brigadier and me forever—and it did, it did—it also reunited us and healed me in the person of Cass. Or was I in the least surprised that the Brigadier would come to know—even in the biblical sense—an outsider, a shadow person, an orphan like Cass. Almost from the day we were, literally, taken from one another the Brigadier began to inhabit the mysterious nether world of the spy, a world of audacity, silence, stealth, resourcefulness, and intelligence. At fifteen he went to work as a stock and bag boy at the A&P, he began sneaking into our room, shoes in hand, at all hours of the night, occasionally with the ghostly light of dawn diffusing the room. Often wakened by him, I remember hoping it was some older co-worker at the A&P, a ravishing widow perchance, who was showing him the ropes, teaching him how to screw, no, no, not that way, this way.

  In any event, I knew I’d never learn who it was from the mute and gentlemanly Brigadier. It was not until much later when I heard his older friends say of Bill, “Ex’d screw a snake in the bush—or just the bush if there was no snake there” that it occurred to me that there may have been more than one girl. Nor do I now have any doubt that my parents knew as well as I what time he was getting home. But what does a parent say to someone who is taller, better-looking, and brighter than they, who is getting high Bs and As without cracking a book, and who is self-supporting into the bargain? Yes, the Brigadier left home forever shortly after we were separated from each other by his semen.

  The only football game the Brigadier would ever see me play was the Massena game, when he was on leave. And I am sorry about that, for everything the coach predicted for me came true. His name was Ike Borgosian, a fullback and linebacker (his son, Ike Jr., would later be named All-American at West Point). On the very first play from scrimmage he moved in off my nose, and on the snap of the ball hit me the hardest I’d ever been hit, thereby establishing from the opening whistle who was to control the center of the line. Although I survived until the game’s final gun, and though we upset Massena 14-0, I cannot impress enough upon the reader what an excruciatingly long afternoon it was. On one occasion, for example, Borgosian hit me so hard and drove me so quickly backward that I stepped on the foot of our quarterback, who was setting up for a pass, forcing him to trip to the ground. Of course, using Borgosian, the best tackier Massena had, in this way defeated their purposes. The two quarterbacks we alternated, both very bright kids, saw immediately that all we had to do was run away from the center of the line, allowing Borgosian to expend his considerable energies pounding me to a pulp.

  “It was a long afternoon for yuh, huh?” the Brigadier said.

  “Oh, the very longest,” I replied.

  It was the following afternoon, Sunday, and the Brigadier and’ I were walking to the four o’clock showing at the Olympic Theater, after which he’d catch a 7 P.M. bus to Syracuse and connect with a train to whatever base he was returning. The Brigadier did not say any more, and I was grateful for that. As I’d had a lapse only two days before in the Holy Family Church, I was actually debating whether to broach the subject of my abominable illness. As brilliant as I considered the Brigadier, he was only twenty on that Sunday afternoon and because I did not begin my own research into spontaneous ejaculation until I was well into my thirties, I knew his only horrified advice would have been that it was a grave matter indeed and that, now that Dad was dead, I hadn’t any choice but consulting the family physician, who of course would have been just as horrified and bewildered as the Brigadier. On the verge—the words dancing on the tip of my tongue—of telling Bill what had happened to me during the High Mass, and buttressing this spell with a dozen other equally shameful, obscene, and insane interludes, I was suddenly stunned by what the Brigadier was wondering aloud. Had he said that?

  “Pardon?”

  “Do you know Cass Mclntyre?”

  I stopped dead in my tracks, the blood zoomed upward, I became giddy, somewhat nauseous, thinking I was literally going to faint. Among his other accomplishments, was the Brigadier telepathic?

  In the end, what it amounted to was this. Cass was one of the girls the Brigadier was “seeing” during his seven-day pass; and the only reason he was bringing her up to me—as I say, the Brigadier was too much of a gentleman to discuss his love life—was that on the two occasions he’d been with Cass all she’d done was talk about me.

  “She talked about me?”

  The Brigadier laughed, at my naivet6 no doubt. “She said you stare at her all the time, and that she knows you like her.”

  “Oh, she knows that, does she?”

  The Brigadier laughed again. “C’mon, stupid, don’t get sore. Cass feels the same way about you.”

  What the Brigadier told me next was to account for a number of things, including how the Brigadier was to elude the Home’s rigid security long enough to spend any time with Cass. Cass hadn’t lived at the Home since the previous spring, when she’d become a foster child and live-in baby sitter for Fairley Parish’s ten-year-old son, Howie.

  “Fairley Parish, for Christ’s sake?”

  That the Brigadier was a friend of Fairley Parish says more about Bill than any words could, for I doubt another twenty-year-old in Watertown had a first-name back-slapping familiarity with Fairley. Fairley was a bookmaker and gambler. For a percentage of the pots he ran the card and crap games at the American Legion, the VFW, and the Elks Club, supplied the cards and dice, and settled disputes. He ran an Italian domino game in a loft on the north side of Public Square. At one time, for a two-year period before the city forced Fairley to take them out, he had a couple dozen dime, quarter, and half-dollar one-armed bandits in the American Legion. With monotonous regularity, at about yearly intervals, Fairley was arrested, paid a hundred-dollar fine, went back to work that night, and our more seemly citizens balmed themselves with the notion that we didn’t allow anything as diabolical as gaming in Watertown.

  Fairley was a very handsome guy, with a cinema star’s slender dark good looks, though his skin always seemed to me to have the pasty jailhouse pallor of people who inhabit the night, so much so that even freshly shaven his black beard was strikingly evident against his milky complexion. His wife, Cookie Parish, who had committed suicide the previous June by hanging herself in the garage, was, I thought, the most beautiful woman I’d ever known, a natural blonde with a trim athletic figure and strikingly even white teeth. From the time I was twelve until I was fourteen, I had caddied at the Thompson Park Golf Course. Cookie played two or three mornings a week and would refuse to go out on a round unless I caddied for her, so that the caddy master, Karl, often had to send another caddy out onto the links to find and replace me and I’d return to the first tee and an impatiently cursing Cookie.

  How a psychiatrist would have diagnosed Cookie is beyond me, but there were elements of both the schizophrenic and the manic-depressive in her. Because of Fan-ley’s occupation, Cookie was a social pariah, she always played alone, and because, as she never wearied of reminding me, my father had taken her virginity when she was fifteen and “a dumb piece of catshit from the North Side,” my father the lifeguard at the St. Mary’s Pool who had taught her how to swim, Cookie felt we were bound by crummy impoverished beginnings and assumed I was the only caddy with whom she’d feel comfortable. Cookie was a superb golfer (I did not know how good until years later when I myself took up the game). There were days when, after a muffed shot, her language was the foulest I’d ever heard, she’d furiously throw her seven iron twenty yards, bellow, “Fuck, suck, cuntlicking cocksucker,” and still come in three over par for eighteen. As I say, she must have thought it tacit between us that both she and my father were “catshit North Siders,” when in fact I not only now lived on the South Side, as did Cookie, but came from a household in which a guy could have his mouth soaped for saying “shit.” On the other hand, and I never knew in what mood to expect Cookie, there were days when she had a dreadful round,
say, twelve or fifteen over par, and she’d laugh joyously at her every mistake, saying things like, “Holy Crimminy, Ex, I mean, am I terrible, or what? I mean, did you ever?” Even on those days, however, she never completed a round without at some point reminding me that my father had been her “first love,” though in her high moods her language was considerably more digestible than when she was on a bummer. Whereas in the latter mood Cookie would be sanguine with self-loathing as well as hateful recriminations against my father, saying things like, “Yeah, every noon when the pool closed for lunch, that prick Earl would drag my ass into the bathhouse, stick that disgusting cock into me, and fuck me half to death”; on Cookie’s highs these animal scenes took on a kind of lace-curtain purity and she’d tell me that Earl had been her first and only love and how happy she’d been “making love” and sharing the sandwiches “Ex’s mom had made for him.” Of course I never knew if any of it were true, for I certainly wasn’t about to confront Earl with it. The only reason I have for suspecting it was true was that once, studying his high school annual, I saw that no few of the females had an inked X over their heads and when I asked my mother what this signified, her face reddened and she said that my father had marked, like Hawthorne’s Hester, I expect, the classmates he’d “kissed.” What was beyond dispute, though, was that Cookie contained within her sad and troubled being the impossible polarity of an errant romantic solipsism, which she tried to anchor in a bedrock of the most distressingly corrupt vileness. Cookie hadn’t needed a psychiatrist. So unalloyable were her component parts, she needed one of those brilliant physicists capable of bringing polonium together with lithium to activate a nuke. Whatever, God had assuredly dealt Cookie an impossible hand. It was as though He’d conceived her, full-blown, with a pin in her left hand and a fully inflated balloon in her right and unfairly—as the expression goes: “nobody said it would be fair”—demanded from her the incredibly ironfisted feat of not bringing the two together. One does not need a psychiatric bent to know Cookie eventually went bang.