On the night of the tenth—the night before the “seizure” —I stayed late at the bar, drinking heavily and talking with B., a grieving young man of twenty. Having recently been rejected by a girl he loved, he was in a state near hyperesthesia. I don’t know why he chose to burden me with his lament. I did not know him well. In high school his brother and I had played football and basketball together; we had at the same time, or I would guess that we had, taken long aching looks at the same girls who were, in some celestial way, blossoming right before our eyes, so that we must once have been “almost friends.” But a few years before, when I was without a job, drinking and drifting, I had borrowed twenty dollars from that brother; and many months later, when I had attempted to repay him, he had steadfastly refused the money, saying, “If the tables had been reversed, buddy, I know you’d have helped me.” He had said this with a certain “style,” as though he were not trying to prove how well he was doing in business (and he was doing well); but still—we could, of course, never again be “almost friends.” Perhaps B. had heard his brother speak of me, and this coupled with my teacher image and the flecks of gray at my temples, led him to assume that I had answers, a conclusion that was not without its irony. In the inner pocket of my jacket was the letter from my wife—”until we are much more firmly settled on our separate roads” —and only moments before B. slithered up to me and said, “Jesus, Ex, I can’t eat or nothin’,” in an alcoholic fury I had telephoned long-distance to my wife and got my sister-in-law, who, refusing to call my wife to the phone, had prompted me to shout “Fuck you!” into the wire. All I had wanted to do was conform to the role—that of the drama’s villain—my sister-in-law had assigned to me; and after I had hung up the receiver, and until B. approached me, I had stood at the bar chuckling pensively at the thought of my sister-in-law’s hysterically indignant I-told-you-so’s. Because I was unhappy I offered B. no easy consolation. While he kept saying, “Oh, Jesus, Ex, Jesus H. Keeriiisst, don’t tell me that,” I told him the ordeal of my own first love, how it had taken me two years to alleviate the pain, how I had risen with it, gone to bed with it, and lived with it all my waking hours until, accepting its naturalness, it had begun to recede. Doubtless B. thought I was being cruel; and I really knew no way of convincing him otherwise. I told him I wished that when I was his age I had sought out some dismal creature for advice. Having gone to fat-assed, “successful” souls (making the American mistake of equating success with wisdom), I was glibly assured that “you’ll get over it”; and when I did not, I despised myself for what I deemed a flimsiness of heart. Seeing a younger version of myself in B.’s wild eyes, I offered him all I could. “Look, B., accept your pain as a part of life. There is, really, absolutely no consolation in telling you that I or any man has undergone the same thing. And then, how would I know I’ve suffered anywhere near what you’re going through? And not knowing that, isn’t any advice I give you presumptuous?”
We drank together until closing time, one whisky after another, our heads bent close together. We talked through the velvety blue smoke, whispering about isolation and loss; with our sibilant voices we were trying to protect the privacy of our hearts from the ears all about us. Presently the lurid white lights, with almost a violent snap, caught us cheek-to-cheek and Freddy was shouting, “You don’t have to go home, gang —but you can’t stay here!” Reluctantly I rose, finished my drink, put on my raincoat, and walked to the door to wait. B. had moved quickly down the bar and was attempting to pick up a young, snub-nosed, and attractive girl who frequented the place. He picked her up, too; and I had to admire the ease with which he did it, speaking only a few words to her. He was a handsome, sensitive boy, and watching him so facilely “move” the girl I wondered what that other girl was searching for, the one who had tossed him over. The three of us left together. We drove around town for an hour or so nipping on B.’s bottle, then went to an all-night diner, The Red Moon. We had been looking for a girl friend of snub-nose’s, one who was, without my being consulted in the matter, supposed to be my date. We found her at The Red Moon. Before getting back into the car, I drew myself up, unzipped my fly, and stood in the middle of the street taking an enormous piss. A car tooted at me, swerved erratically, and just missed me. Speaking out of the corner of her mouth, my new date said, “Jeez, I ain’t going with that crazy bastard!” As she was going back into the diner to her leather-jacketed friends, she added, “Some schoolteacher!”
B., the snub-nosed girl, and I ended at my motel room, where, getting me alone in the bathroom, B. offered me what he called “first shot” at the girl. I declined, thanking him rather too profusely. I fell asleep that night listening to their mating noises from the adjoining bed. My initiation into sex had taken place on the ground behind a billboard sign advertising beer within walking distance from where I was now lying. The girl had received, with neither complaint nor enthusiasm, a good part of Watertown High School’s 1945 football team. Afterward I had had to help her up and walk her, while she clung unsteadily to my arm and wept, to her house some distance down the highway. Listening now, it occurred to me that I hadn’t come very far over the years—no farther really than from one “gang bang” to another, save that I had learned, as B. had yet to learn, that tomorrow the pain would be even greater.
When I awoke, B. and the girl had gone, leaving in the wake of their coupling a great mountain of disheveled bedding, a brilliant stain of orange lipstick smack in the middle of the pillow, and on the exposed sheet the untidy evidence of their urgency. It was only eight o’clock, and though I had hoped to sleep longer, and had the night before drunk one whisky after another for that reason, as much as any other, I was not surprised at the earliness of the hour. For a couple years past, on these autumn Sundays, I had wakened, started up really, with the terrifying notion that the game was already under way, that I had missed—God knows what—some unsurpassably executed play. Leaping from bed, I would be confronted by the clock and from that moment on my morning would be hell; for I would begin undergoing the nervousness to which only the players should be subjected: the giddiness, the thirst, time’s protracted passage.
On this morning my tension was intensified by my inability to keep my eyes from the awful ruin of the adjoining bed. I closed my eyes and opened them; I rolled over and rolled back, always with my eyes returning to that bed. It was as though I expected to see there some frightful clue to my destiny, some forbidding look into the darker recesses of my being. When I could stand looking no longer, I rose and, with the swift and mechanical propriety of an outraged landlady, made up the bed. Then I made up my own, took a scalding shower, shakily shaved, dressed except for my shoes, and lay back on the bed to watch television. It was a “religious” show, a drama about the redemption of an alcoholic woman through the discovery of Jesus Christ. There was a time when these shows had provided me with unending amusement; but understanding the slightness of that which provided my own sustenance, I was no longer able to find amusement where others took comfort, no matter how asininely presented. In this show, though, the woman looked incredibly like my sister-in-law, so that it was impossible for me to believe in either her degeneracy—for my sister-in-law, in her way, was a decent woman—or the resultant redemption. The resemblance awoke in me, moreover, the memory of my ill-advised telephone call of the night before; and I now, in the nervous light of Sunday, became ruddy with shame, then literally sick, dropping to my hands and knees to throw up in the toilet bowl. By nine-thirty, when I decided to go downtown for the Sunday papers, I was pacing the carpeted floor, smoking one Salem after another, and cursing myself for not having bought a six-pack—an abstinence imposed upon myself under the idiotic pretense that I was not a drunk.
At the newsstand in the lobby of the Hotel Woodruff I bought the New York and Syracuse papers, the Times, the Tribune, the Post-Standard, and the Herald-Journal; and with that great weight under my arm I walked east on Public Square to The Crystal, where, sliding into a booth, I ordered tomato
juice and black coffee and began my weekly ritual. Removing the sports sections from the various newspapers, I stacked them in a neat pile to one side of the table. Now I removed the various magazine, entertainment, and book sections and piled these on top of that pile. Finally I gathered up the bulkier parts of the papers, the sections containing the world news—that record of yesterday’s monstrous deceptions, betrayals, and obscenities—and flung them into the seat opposite mine, where, for all of me, they could remain forever unread.
It was my habit to read the magazine and entertainment sections first, and read them in the most cursory of ways. I read, or glanced at, only those articles about cinema starlets nobody has ever heard of. These pieces fascinated me for their subjects were well on their way to becoming insane. Their world was bordered by skin-diving; by Cary Grant, “the most luscious man I’ve ever seen”; by Tolstoi (their favorite author); and by their own astoundingly juicy selves (aping Elizabeth Taylor, they all had “the mind of a child and the body of a woman”). I never finished one of these articles without staring, lengthily and gloomily, at the accompanying pictures. Invariably the girls were scantily clad, posed in such a way as to show to advantage the highlights of preposterously lovely bodies, and always one photo showed a close-up of their luscious mouths puckered suggestively, round and hot and soft and ready for erotic oral business. I used to imagine flogging them to death with a truncheon. Like Orwell’s Winston Smith I would imagine raping them and, at the moment of orgasm, slashing their throats or bashing in their lovely faces with a spiked club. Imagining these things, I felt neither guilt nor horror but a kind of gleeful detachment; like Orwell’s Outer Party members who were well on their way to the Inner Party, it would be no time at all before these girls believed the “realities” their press agents were molding for them, believed that their minds were attuned to Count Tolstoi, no time before they were in a state of whimsical dementia. For more than any other reason I wanted to truncheon them to death because I would never have them, knowing that they were rewards—like a Rolls-Royce—for those obedient men who accepted society’s standards of success, standards that seemed to me not only wrongheaded but grotesque. The girls were part of America’s plenty and, once used, one disposed of them the way one got rid of a Cadillac and moved on to an Aston-Martin.
Next I read the book reviews. I read them with nostalgia and remorse. There was a period when I had lived on book reviews, when I had basked and drawn sustenance from what I deemed the light of their intelligence, the beneficence of their charm. But something had gone sour. Over the years I had read too much, in dim-lighted railway stations, lying on the davenports of strangers’ houses, in the bleak and dismal wards of insane asylums. That reading had forced the charm to relinquish itself. Now I found that reviews were not only bland but scarcely, if ever, relevant; and that all books, whether works of imagination or the blatant frauds of literary whores, were approached by the reviewer with the same crushing sobriety. I wanted the reviewer to be fair, kind, and funny. I wanted to be made to laugh. I had no better luck that Sunday than on any other.
Finally I turned to the sports sections. Even then I did not begin reading about the Giants. I was like a child who, having been given a box of chocolates, eats the jellies and nuts first and saves the creamy caramels till last. I read about golf in Scotland, surf-boarding in Oahu, football as Harvard imagines it played, and deep-sea fishing in Mexico. Only then did I turn to the Giants, having by then already torn from the Times and stuffed into my pocket Arthur Daley’s column, which I always saved to read but a couple minutes before kickoff, the biggest caramel of them all. I read every word of these articles over and over again. Knowing precisely what I was looking for, I sought assurance that by five that afternoon the Giants would have another victory, some statement that would allay my mounting anxiety. I wanted the Giants’ coach, Allie Sherman, to be quoted from some unequivocal position of superiority: “We’ve got the best team in football; and we’re going to beat them just as we’re going to beat everybody.” Because coaches are notoriously pessimistic, one rarely came across any such statement. The outer reaches of Sherman’s optimism ran to statements like, “We’re in good shape; if we lose, we won’t have anyone to blame.” But on this Sunday I found nothing even this adventuresome. Occasionally the opposing coach would jeer. He would say the Giants were lucky, or that they were a bunch of weary old men, the latter a comment that circulated rather freely that year. I searched now for a statement to this effect. Certain that the statement would be pinned to the bulletin board of the Giants’ locker room in an attempt to infuriate the team to unbelievable feats, I could attach the insult to my heart and, with it, sneer and gloat as Robustelli, Grier, Huff, and Katcavage pitilessly stomped their opponents into the hard, dry turf of Dallas. But on this Sunday the opposing coach proved equally genteel; and by noon I was back at The Parrot helping Freddy move some tables to get the bar ready for the afternoon and knowing no more about the outcome of the game than I had at the same time the Sunday before. As we worked, though, Freddy and I reassured each other over and over again that there was nothing whatever to worry about. Freddy said, “Dallas? Are you kidding me?” I said, “Dallas? Are you kidding me?” We laughed disparagingly.
Freddy said, “You’ll miss the Counselor, though, huh?”
“‘Deed I will,” I said. “‘Deed I will.”
The Counselor was my best friend, and until a few Sundays earlier had always been my game-watching companion. We had known each other since high school and had, from the moment we met in a Plane Geometry class, recognized each other for what we were—hedonistic. To the Counselor’s credit, he still believed in one thing I no longer did. Aside from Liquor and the Giants ( and I had brought him round to that team), he still believed in the consoling power of Fornication. On his last Sunday in Watertown, he, his most recent girl (a lithe, lovely university coed), and I had stood at the bar while the Counselor, his blond head towering above us, had sipped his scotch on the rocks, patted his girl affectionately on her backside, and, eyes glued to the television, had kept repeating with the composure of a British barrister, “All right, Giants, all right.” Unlike mine, the Counselor’s enthusiasm was restrained, as though he never for a moment doubted the Giants’ ability to overcome all obstacles. In this case his restraint was admirable. Freddy was holding a hundred dollars of his, a bet he had made with a transplanted Detroiter who had believed, to the Counselor’s vast and studied amusement, that the Detroit Lions were fourteen points better than our club. The Counselor could not afford to be overly amused. The money was all he had, and it was his “getting-away” booty. Having recently been disbarred, the Counselor, unhappily, was a counselor no more. To make a living, he had had on Mondays to leave that Sunday idyll of football, scotch, and fornication and go down the hill and into the city where the play gets a good deal rougher than ever it gets in Yankee Stadium; at one awful moment his colleagues had looked behind his white-toothed and patronizing smile and had made the discovery, which must have been horrible to them, not only that the Counselor didn’t believe in them, their little white houses, or the Black River Valley Club but that, unlike those peers who were to sit in such harsh judgment of him, he did not imagine himself Justice Holmes. It wasn’t that the Counselor had no pride of law (he was, in fact, a good lawyer) but that, knowing his limitations and his financial obligations, he saw the law as a way to make a living like any other, selling false teeth or writing best-sellers.
After the game the Counselor collected the two hundred dollars, his own hundred plus that of the Detroiter’s, slid it into his pocket, and we made our curt good-byes, promising to get together someplace out of town in late December when the Giants, who had beaten a great Lion team that day, would undoubtedly be meeting the Green Bay Packers for the championship of the National Football League. Then the Counselor walked down the half-dozen steps that led out of the bar, a surprisingly proud figure, I thought, his nymph clinging tightly to his arm, and out through the
door into the cool October evening. I had wanted to call to him then, to offer him something, affection or gratitude. In my own bad time, when I had been shuttling back and forth between asylums, when even my family had despaired of my recovery, he had given me a davenport to lie down upon, and books to read, and money with which to buy liquor. Never once had he inquired about my health. He hadn’t because he had understood that what I needed was time to get used to being an outsider, a condition he had long ago accepted about himself and which had become an article of the faith by which he moved. I wished I had money or a haven to offer him, but I had neither; and I never loathed my home as I did at that moment. It wasn’t as if the Counselor had been some shyster from Brooklyn come to take over the tank town. He had been born in Watertown, educated in its schools, and had been young together with its sons and daughters—quite some time before; and I couldn’t help thinking that a few in the bar association might have stood up for him, might have sensed that his destruction and his betrayal and his failure were their destruction and their betrayal and their failure. At that moment, watching him descend the stairs, I had this unnerving vision of my friend drifting from bar to bar, from girl to girl, with no kind place whatever to look back upon. I tried to call to him then, but all I could think to say was, “I’d like to cut their fucking hearts out,” and that hysterical imprecation would have given him little consolation.
A Fan's Notes Page 2
