A Fan's Notes

by Frederick Exley

  Waiting for the blood to subside from my face, I sat staring gloomily at the floor. When I did finally muster the courage to look up, I was relieved to see that he was no longer looking at me, he had lost interest. With his chair now propped against the wall, leaning back, he was smoking and blowing smoke rings, one after another—smoke rings as symmetrical and full-bodied as doughnuts. He seemed now indifferent not only to me but even to the predicament—that of being hospitalized—in which he found himself; it was almost as if, through the holes in the smoky doughnuts that rushed toward the ceiling, he were looking deep into some sphere beyond other men’s apprehension. There was about Paddy a funereal depth, the kind of gravity that made other men turn from him. It was this solemnity that surprised me.

  It surprised me because I had noticed Paddy two days before, on his arrival at Avalon Valley. He had made a definite impression on me then, but it was nothing at all like the impression I got this day. On first seeing him, I had detected a slight suggestion of gravity: he had a big upper body, strong heavy arms and shoulders that he carried on thin, almost sticklike legs, walking with precise, arrogant little steps; holding his torso in a militaristic, yes, regal way, he had a spine as curved as a celery stalk. It was a bearing that had created an illusion of height. I had thought him at least six feet, where now, to my astonishment, I discovered he was a good deal shorter, no more certainly than five nine. His features were broad and pock-marked, his face had been ruddy and swollen with drink, his eyes as misty as heavy dew. My early and very distinct impression was that he was a parody of the drunken Irishman, middle-aged, sentimental, sloppy—and I was even sure that he would, when he sobered up, entertain us with songs about Mother and Sister Kate and Galway Bay. Studying him now, when he was sober, I got a rather different impression. Where I had originally taken him to be in his mid-fifties, it was now alarmingly obvious that he was probably this side of forty; where he had been ruddy-complexioned, the swelling of drink had now gone from his face, and his features, if not handsome, were not unprepossessing. But now that their heavy mist had vanished, it was his eyes that struck one. They were huge and black and almost impossible to look into, to meet, impossible for the astonishing and somber sagacity they intimated—as though he looked “quite through the deeds of men.” Continuing to study him, I felt at first astonishment, then distaste, finally a kind of loathing. A moment later I was sure I loathed him.

  A young man who had only recently come from the doctor’s office suddenly broke into a violent spiel of indignation aroused by the questions the doctor had put to him. This was surprising. Like the rest of us, he must have known a number of these questions before going into the office. Still, he cursed and ranted, demanding to know of us who the doctors thought they were, then rhetorically provided his own answer—God? We assumed that the doctor had unwittingly hit very close to the boy’s distress. Hence we tried to offer him sympathy. “Everyone’s asked the same things,” a number of men said, trying to convince him of the universality of his plight. But the more we assured him, the more he seemed to take these assurances as license to bellow about his rights, about the dignity of the human specimen, and about how he was, at the first opportunity, going to call his attorney. He seemed unsatisfied with this solution. Dropping his voice to a secretive whisper, he revealed to us that he had a friend in Albany. “A big man,” he said. Waiting for our response, he looked at each of us in turn; he looked in such a meaningful and melodramatic way that none of us could doubt he had the Governor in mind. Not doubting that, we all fell silent. As he rambled on now at a near-fever pitch, it occurred to us all, simultaneously I would guess, that the man was, as we used to say, far, far gone. He continued his terrible diatribe against the doctors, revealing as he went along the measures he contemplated for putting them in their places. Then he lost all coherence and began a hysterical giggle, compounded with a slight twitch and very pronounced emission of saliva from his mouth. When he finally fell silent, the stillness was of that horrified kind that follows a fart in a Methodist church.

  At that point I looked up again and saw that Paddy the Duke was looking at me, smiling, amused. In the most audible of voices, a voice that could be heard from one end of the corridor to the other, at the same time nodding in the direction of the Governor’s friend, he said: “What the fuck’s he think he’s here for—dandruff?”

  Down the hill Paddy the Duke found himself in our ward and succeeded, in only a matter of days, perhaps hours, in making himself the most despised man in Avalon Valley. His sins were many and grievous, oh, so very grievous, and perhaps best epitomized in his adamant—in its way monstrous—refusal to accept the camaraderie of his fellow patients—his total inability to recognize that we were undergoing an ordeal together. Now even I, who had sworn against involvement of any kind, feigned this togetherness, though I seldom knew the names of patients I talked with by the hour. I feigned it because I was certain the doctors expected it. Paddy would have no part of it. Not only did he not speak to any of us; should any of us speak to him, he acted—coming up out of some deep reverie characterized by staring into smoke rings—as though he thought our impertinence warranted a good thrashing. The look that came over him when someone approached him familiarly is beyond any art. Once or twice in the first days he was approached in this way. Particularly I remember a young man trying to enlist him in a card game. Paddy’s body had tensed; he had gazed at the youth, his piercing eyes had seemed to sink deeper into their sockets; then he had risen, bolted upright from his chair. For many moments he had stood staring, his right arm making whipping motions against his flank as though he were General Fierceheart whopping it with a riding crop. The boy had turned to us, smiled weakly, someone had waved him away, and, turning, he had fled. The doors to the sleeping room were opened immediately subsequent to supper; after a time Paddy, to protect his privacy, took to going directly to his bed where he lay fully clothed, eyes wide open, searching the ceiling for whatever truth it was he hoped to come to.

  Paddy’s sins were not all of omission. He did not in the least understand that the hospital was a place of endless and fatiguing waiting, a place of queues. One waited to brush his teeth, to get his orange tranquilizer, to be served his rice pudding, sometimes even to relieve his bowels. Paddy waited for none of these things. Though I took only one meal, breakfast, in the patients’ cafeteria, it was here that his disregard of us was most striking. Walking by a hundred, two hundred of us at a clip, walking by as though we had no more existence for him than so many bugs, walking in his arrogant, military way, he proceeded to the head of the line. Once there, he blithely forced his way into it, picked up his tin tray, demanded from the help double orders of his favorite dishes, turned and proceeded to his table. And it was his table. Such was his forbidding aspect that we daren’t intrude; and there he sat alone amidst us—a bunch of chattering, food-slopping, tray-clanking lunatics—like some holy man, delicately nibbling at his food, his black eyes staring off into space with the intensity of a man set on discovering the Gimmick To Move The World. Once or twice his cafeteria etiquette was challenged by one of the braver among us; but he succeeded, by the very regalness of his bearing and the coldness of his eyes, in backing the challenger down. After a time we began to live granting him his privileges, a docility on our part that we justified by permitting ourselves a shameful rumor that Paddy had friends in high places. Before a month elapsed, the rumor had taken such a firm grip on our imaginations that we began to live in the apprehension of Paddy’s revealing himself as someone other than a patient, Someone Elevated, someone who would suddenly begin barking commands at us. His running roughshod over us was despicable, but not so much so as our cowardice. It had to end of course. Things might have remained pretty much the way they were, with us remaining servile to his imposing demeanor, had he not finally committed a profound sin of commission. He beat us all in Ping-pong.

  He beat us utterly. He beat us to the point of bringing tears to our eyes, homicide to our heart
s. When he did so, he rallied us and made us One. In some wards the favorite game of the patients was whist, in others pool, and in ours it was Ping-pong. Each afternoon, on completing our various jobs, we went to the Recreation Room where the members of our ward monopolized one of the three tables, playing round-robin games of twenty-one. Our rules were simple. The winner of the game retained his paddle until he was defeated, which in the case of some of the better players occasionally took two, even three afternoons. I don’t know how Paddy found us. He might have heard some of the endless and good-natured boasting, the threats and counter-threats, the wondrous bets (“Hey, Exley! Betcha million-trillion dollars I beat your ass off tomorrow!”) that went on in the ward each evening—all done in the exhilarating anticipation of the next day’s contests. But this seems unlikely because of Paddy’s habit of going immediately to his bed. All I do know is that one afternoon, while I was playing, a silence descended on the Recreation Room, a kind of melancholy almost, and when I looked up I saw that Paddy was seated near the table, watching us. In his mouth he had a cigarette, of course, and he was watching us in a half-amused, half-abstracted way, blowing smoke rings. The men presented to me one face of loathing and disgust. Paddy sat there for three afternoons, scarcely watching us; at the same time we knew he wasn’t missing the scoring of a single point. Slumped down in his chair, pursing his lips in a rather obscene way, he formed his disgusting doughnuts. The melancholy stayed with us. Nobody played well, tempers became very short. We had just about determined that he was going to sit there forever when a player, having been defeated by me in a close game, threw his paddle angrily on the table. At that point Paddy rose, brushed aside the challenger who was approaching the table, picked up the paddle, and began a volley with me. The unseen ball went floating by me. As one man we went tense. Frightful little hissing noises issued from our throats. The nerve! Paddy the Duke had ignored our lines for the last time! It was incredible! We were just about to jump him—to jump him together as one furious animal—jump him and break his god-dam neck!—when, quite suddenly, quite astonishingly, quite marvelously, a superb idea—a stroke of genius—occurred to I me. Having detected the way Paddy held the paddle, perpendicular to the table, like a goddam girl, I suddenly realized how to humiliate him utterly—beat his Irish hide in a game! I Instantly I started winking insanely at the men, who were even AT now moving toward Paddy. Coming to a jolting stop, having seen my frantic winks and having interpreted them correctly, they now let their faces beam idiotically in recognition. Presently the room was filled with as many winks and gleeful giggles as the sky with stars. Paddy beat me twenty-one to two. He then went on to hold the paddle for nine days.

  How can I describe those nine days? Even after my fiasco, we began them on a note of contemptuous and hopeful hostility. We ended them—we who had already been locked up as being, well, let’s be kind and say rather singular personalities —as drooling, raving, temple-pounding, hair-pulling lunatics, as close probably to real insanity as any of us had ever been. Paddy’s Ping-pong game was no game. He had no serve. He had no backhand. He had no slam. He had, in effect, no offense whatever. All Paddy could do was return the ball—and that return became our monomania. It was the fever in our brains. It was the longing in our hearts. It was Ahab enlisting us in a blasphemous bargain toward our own destruction. We went to bed with that return; we dreamed about it. We rose to that return; we lived all our waking hours with it, trying to fathom its perverseness. During the game Paddy never moved. He stood ramrod straight only inches from the middle of the table, and no matter how furiously we slammed the ball at him, or how adroitly we placed it, he invariably—with a girlish movement we could scarcely detect—had his paddle there waiting. The paddle made contact with the ball, met it, and the ball, seeming to float at us so softly, would scarcely clear the net as we went crashing into the table bent on bashing it down his throat. It looked so easy. There was only one trouble. Paddy’s return was never where our paddle was. It took the most erratic bounces I have ever seen, to one’s right when it should have gone left, to one’s left when it should have gone right, straight back at Paddy, and, incredibly, sometimes not even bouncing at all but settling down into a horrifying and infuriating little piddle, as if the son-of-abitching thing were expiring in The Grand Style. That bounce had us running all over the back of the table, our eyes bulging with the symptoms of apoplexy. We perspired so that our clothes hung leadlike to our backs. We uttered, bellowed really, vilenesses that would make a pornographer blush. We hurtled ourselves into the edge of the table, raising great purple welts on our thighs. We broke a half-dozen paddles in frustration. We ground Ping-pong balls to white dust under the heels of our shoes. We brought the best players—”ringers” —in from other wards. One of our number, the first among us to “crack,” showed up one day in tennis shoes and white shorts. Stripping to the waist when his turn came, he ran around the table so furiously the water leaked from him in rivulets bigger than are seen in Arizona. When the game was done, the man was weeping, his nose was bleeding, his white shorts were fouled with dirt, his elbows and knees were scraped raw, and he was sitting in the middle of the concrete floor, his teeth biting deep into his paddle.

  It was all for naught. We knew it, and from that day on we did the only thing we could think of to do. We jeered Paddy. We mimicked the girlish way he held the paddle. -Look at meeeh—” in a lisp—”I’m Katherine O’Hara O’Sullivan O’Day, and I’m just too presheeous for words!” Now the man would proceed around the table, wispily swinging his hips in what he imagined to be a feminine way. Frightful little hissing noises continued to issue from our throats. We decided that Paddy’s serve was illegal. He changed it. We even decided that he cheated—how, we didn’t articulate. “If we ever catch you,” we cautioned him, our voices tense with menace. Throughout all this Paddy continued to stand ramrod straight, playing his game, occasionally smiling at one or another of our more outlandish threats. When the smiles became frequent, when our threats, that is, became more numerous, I began to grow uneasy, sensing something very like hysteria setting in.

  In the first days Paddy had held the paddle, we had spent our evenings huddled together in the ward, discussing the best way to beat him. But as the days passed and the futility of our desires became increasingly evident, these meetings had turned from strategy discussions to some more hopeful and concrete ways we could inflict humiliation on Paddy. They began in innocent wickedness. Someone wanted to urinate on his toothbrush. Someone else wanted to duck his head in the toilet bowl. But they began to get increasingly creative. “I got it!” one of our number suggested one night. “We’ll wait till about two in the morning, see. Then we’ll grab one of the fags by his scrawny neck, see. Then we’ll set him gently on Paddy’s chest. Got the picture?” Here the man’s eyes ran quite lewdly wild with the creativity of his vision. We all nodded impatiently, our mouths open. “And then—ho, ho, ho—” and here the man got down on his knees on the floor assuming the fag’s position on Paddy’s imaginary chest. “And then what?” someone squealed in anticipation. “And then—for Christ’s sake, what else? We’ll make the fag stick his dinker into Paddy’s jaw!” One would have thought we had been trapped in a cave for nine days, and the man had just come up with a brilliant idea for breaking us out. “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” everyone screamed in unison. “No! No! No!” I bellowed in protest.

  My closest acquaintance at Avalon Valley was a brilliant, tobacco-chawing, cynical and acrid Italian man from Staten Island. He was twenty-six, his hair was completely white, and he looked fifty-six. He used the word fuck with a frequency I have never heard in a world quite given over to crassness. We called him Snow White. Without removing his hands from his a pockets or sliding up in his chair, and prefacing his sour remarks by expectorating a great glob of tobacco juice on the floor (he always maintained, an evil smile on his lips, that it - didn’t make any difference because the juice and the floor were the same color), he said, “Fuck, no! That fucking bastard
would bite the poor fucking bugger’s dinker right off at its fucking stump!” Surprisingly, most of these suggestions were made to me. Against my will and for reasons I didn’t understand, I had become a kind of leader and had only to nod my head to get Paddy his long-deserved comeuppance. But I remained cautious, trying to think of something a little more subtle, something that would not cost any of us any more time than we were already destined to spend in the hospital. By the time the above suggestion was made, though, the men were tiring of me; and it was really Snow White’s protest that saved Paddy that day. I went to bed that night knowing that the men were on the verge of acting on their own.

  The next day Paddy, as arbitrarily as he had snatched up the paddle—on the ninth day, after four or five games—permitted me (I was sure of it) to beat him in a close game, laid down the paddle, left the Recreation Room, and we never saw him there again. A loner, he had known exactly how to gauge the hostility of the crowd, precisely the moment to go out the door.