A Fan's Notes

by Frederick Exley

  Among the Thousand Islands, I then built for the team the most elaborate training camp imaginable. In the same way that Bunny Sue had been my dream of person, the lush green islands, the heart-stopping blue river, had always been my dream of place—the place to which, while “traveling” about America, I had compared all other places and found them wanting. Scattered in an intricately planned pattern about the islands were football fields, conditioning gymnasiums, and posh living quarters for the players and their families, a theater on this island, a golf course on that one. Smack and rather astonished-looking in the middle of one of the larger islands in my pigskin empire was a vast, gabled, candy-striped hotel, the Giant Inn, rooms by reservation well in advance only.

  Occupying and making my headquarters in red-leather booth Number 1 of a heavy-beamed, mahogany-lined bar, I was a kind of intellectually aloof Toots Shor and inaccessible to all but a chosen few: Ernest Hemingway, Marilyn Monroe, Edmund Wilson, Lee Remick, John Cheever, Sophia Loren, Vladimir Nabokov, Ingrid Bergman, Saul Bellow, Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Penn Warren, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, and some select others. Behind a pair of shaded spectacles, dressed in herringbone, vested tweed suits, sipping sour mash on the rocks, browsing through the essays of Chesterton, everyone, even “my” players, pointed me out rather breathlessly. It was a homage to which I occasionally responded. Nodding to my press agents who hovered constantly about the bar that I was at the moment “available,” I’d permit either player or guest (one had to give the latter something for his fifty dollars a day) to be escorted to my table for an introduction and on very rare occasions—occasions which they unquestionably cherished throughout their pedestrian lifetimes—I invited them to join me for a single drink, no more, and I had a devastating way of arching my brows into half-moons to herald the end of the conversation. Trying to determine how accessible my table should be to Gifford gave me the devil’s own time. Finally deciding that it would be bad for team morale to favor him over the other players, I did concede him a rather cursory nod as he passed to and from the bar and had a grand time imagining him thinking, “I know that smug son of a bitch from some place.”

  In the hot afternoons I took my private elevator from the bar to my penthouse suite at the top of the hotel. A wide, carpeted, cool suite done in pastels, its great picture windows opened to view the islands for miles around. Showering, and drawing the beige curtains so that the room was bathed in a burst-of-morning Venetian light, I lay down on the bed and buzzed downstairs to have one of my hand-picked, college-girl lifeguards sent up to me. Sighing contentedly, I lighted a cigarette and hummed. They came meekly, standing timidly in the middle of the carpeted floor, their golden arms hung laxly at their twitching sides. With trembling fingers I slid the straps of their black, Olympic-style swimsuits from their finely tanned shoulders, exposing them to the waist. “Gee, Mr. Exley,” they invariably said at this point, “I never thought you’d get around to me.” My lips caressed those shoulders then; just before slipping the suits the rest of the way off and lifting them onto the great sateen bed, I suavely paraphrased a little Eliot: “There is always time, my young one—time for you and time for me, and time yet for—”

  On awakening I would kick Christie III in the ass, say, “Wake up, yuh good-for-nothin’ bum!” We would descend the stairs, flick on the television to the Kiddie Kartoons, lie back down on the couch, and wait for Mom to call us to supper. It would not be to the two-inch-thick cuts of prime rib I favored at the Giant Inn but to ordinary meat loaf.

  Except about Christie III, whom she thought I pestered too much, I don’t once remember having a talk with my mother during those months. It was true that I pestered the dog. Such was my loneliness that after a time I ascribed human characteristics to the mutt. I talked to him constantly (“Let me tell you about the ambiguity of Henry James, Christie”). I taught him to sit up manlike, his spine leaning against the back of the davenport; and with my arm thrown buddy-like over his shoulder, we sat and “watched” the television together. I even made him a little blue sweatshirt, a replica of my own, and with fastidious care dressed him in it. My mother said, “Oh, don’t!”; but she laughed. “For Christ’s sake, he loves it,” I said. Then I picked him up and rolled him roughly around my chest while he feigned growling ferociously and snapped, toothlessly, at my nose. “He’s my lover boy. It’s all very homo sexual! Right, Christie?” My mother laughed, but added, “You shouldn’t talk like that.” An innocent who had for so many years kept her mind unsullied by evil, she was weighed down by my silent refusal to offer an explanation of what had brought me to that davenport, but not nearly so much as by what that silence told her of the things I had discovered within myself. Looking abruptly up, I would find her studying me, alarmed, at times almost astonished; and then, detecting that I was aware of her, she would timidly turn away and go back to her dusting. Steinbeck never explicitly tells us what happened to Kino, who, having gone out in the world and discovered its evil, and the evil within himself, comes back to the estuary to live among the simple fishermen. But he tells us enough to suggest that Kino lived out his life a man apart from those innocents, a man who aroused in them shudders of distaste for something they understood only instinctively. Looking at my mother, I often sensed in her something like this shuddering repulsion. She was right in feeling this way. Out on the road I had discovered my own putrefaction, had discovered in my heart murder, utter, brutal, and conscienceless murder.

  Fleeing first from Chicago to Los Angeles, I had established residence with a couple drunks I had known at USC, had showered, shaved, rinsed the long months of alcohol from my mouth, and had paid my last—or certainly my last sincere—obeisance to the American Business Community. Thinking that I might outlast what had become for me a dim and cheer less world—I envisioned myself escorting boodles of cinema starlets around the world on promotional tours—surrounded and buffered from that grayness by the beautiful, the talented, and the generous, I wrote letters to the Messrs. Warner, Wald, Disney, and Zanuck, and to MGM, RKO, CBS, NBC, et al., inviting them to consider me for publicity work. For my trouble I was given the courtesy of one odd and unsettling reply.

  Answering the telephone in the apartment one forlorn evening, I found at the other end of the wire the Vice President for Public Relations of one of the real behemoths of the entertainment industry. He was, I think, slightly drunk. He told me that some days before he had received my letter, that its “sincerity” —my heart leaped in wild anticipation—had impressed him, and that he had had me on his mind now for some days. What ensued was an hour’s conversation in which he did all the talking, I the listening, and in which there was not, as I hoped there would be, a job offer. Not only did he not offer me a job, but he insisted adamantly, peevishly, even desperately, that I stay away from “his” industry. The people one dealt with, he said, were neither beautiful nor talented but rotten, corrupt, self-centered, vicious, and double-dealing. And though I know that I had never for a moment doubted this, the conversation was, notwithstanding, a most unnerving one. The man’s voice was dishearteningly weary, as if reflecting the long years of his humiliations and degradations, his paying homage to, and groveling before, these people. Above this and more singular still, there was a false articulateness to what he told me, as if, though drunk, he were giving a memorized speech. It was too orotund and rhetorical; and after listening to him for a while, I began wondering if he didn’t make this call often. By the time he hung up 1 was almost certain that he did; and I conjured this weird picture of him living out his days in that phony, that insubstantial world and, come five o’clock, stuffing letters from “sincere” young men into his pocket and running home to telephone them with his tiredly savage and paternal advice. Though I chuckled with tentative appreciation, I feared for the man. It seemed to me that he was not only under heavy mental duress but that he might one day find one of those young men more ambitious than “sincere,” and that it was only a matter of time until his employers were informed of
the opinions of the public relations chief. Having nothing better to do, I spent a morning writing him a note in which I thanked him for his kindness and in which, with some nice subtleties, I worked in my apprehensions concerning him. I never sent it. Subtlety is wasted on a drowning man, and I had no way of knowing whether or not I was an isolated case who had caught him at a bad moment. No doubt he is still busily engaged in convincing people of the beauty, the nobility, and the innate rectitude of the Hollywood product. Or he is cringing in a corner and weeping scalding tears in a madhouse.

  Whichever he’s doing, I took his advice, forgot about pulpous starlets, and a few weeks later I found myself a publicist for the missile systems division of a large aircraft corporation. Only a few years older than myself, the boss was an obese, doughy, chain-smoking, harassed-acting man who had appeared to staff his department with surly misfits made in his own image and who weren’t likely to pine after his job. The striking blond ponytail with the fine behind and thick, lazy legs who had, on slippered-feet, led me through a number of barricaded doors for my interview, and who acted as the department’s receptionist, was the only eye-pleasing thing in our beaver-boarded, barracks-like offices; and it developed that she was a thing. Detecting that she seemed almost upset one day, I solicitously asked what the problem was. “My mother is a whore,” she said with calm finality, and that is the only thing she said in the two weeks I was with the company. A top scientist delivered a classified speech to a classified society and then, attempting to blow his own horn, demanded that I make an unclassified news release out of it. He sent my efforts back with the comment, “This is terrible!!!” When I tried to see him to get a more complete idea of what precious machinations were involved in making classified material available to the public, his secretary, a black ponytail with stunning azure eyes, informed me that her boss was a “genius” and never offered explanations other than “This is terrible” or “This is okie-dokie.” “I see,” I said, and retreated pensively to the publicity department.

  Seated engagingly at the desk next to mine, behind pictures of his four-eyed wife and three adorable children, was Harold. Pathetically, Harold imagined himself a bright, ambitious, clean-cut, and rising young executive. Harold sweated and picked his nose. He was neither ambitious nor bright. On the one hand, he was the worst kind of sycophant, a whimpering, womanish, two-faced Stinky Pete whose toadying to the boss bordered on the obscene; on the other hand, he was a man of, at first perplexing, then benumbing, and finally, a horrifyingly vast stupidity—a cretinism that became colossally evident one day when he asked me to read, and comment upon, a script he had prepared for a “pep rally” for the company’s sales force, a little get-together to spur those shiny-toothed men into selling bigger and better missiles. Written in the format of a television show, the script, or what I read of it, was predictably inane, innocuous, and infantile. Reading to the point where, to the tune of a Pepsodent commercial, he had inserted a nifty little jingle about missiles—a jingle whose con tents escape me but whose substance was not unlike: “That’s the way the missile goes/Pop goes the world!”—I had found the words blurring on me, I had lost all intelligibility and had sat pretending to read, from time to time looking up at the creator of this masterpiece, who, while I “read,” had hung anxiously by his buttocks from the edge of his chair in gleeful anticipation of my approval, an approval I gave him, chuck ling madly and nodding little accolades of approbation in his direction.

  “Chuckling madly” is a precise description. Even as I nodded at him it occurred to me that, without feeling any remorse whatever, I could kill him, destroy him, remove him from the race of men. For years I had been aware of the theory, expounded by Orwell and others, that the world was in all probability mad, but I had consoled myself with the notion that such men were dyspeptic malcontents, and it was shocking to discover in that simple-minded jingle and childishly self-congratulatory face that their case against the world was such that the world would be best advised to plead nolo contender. Something happened to me then, something snapped. For days afterward I sat staring at Harold and imagined killing him. The world’s insanity, and therefore its tragic evil, seemed to reach a kind of culmination in his sweaty, clean-shaven, and infantile face. I saw myself waiting in ambush for him, and then bashing in his head with a sledge hammer. Here I ran over him—he turned at the last moment and I saw that mindless face show horror—with a tractor trailer. Here—well, I saw myself destroy him in a thousand ways, each more ingenious and cruel than the last, and any of which I should have got away with, my motives being outside those understood by The Law. The circumstance that finally shattered my concentration on him was that the script was used, none who heard it took exception (indeed, all found it amusing), and thus I found myself in need of a machine gun. Doing the obvious thing, I quit, packed a bag, and went back on the road.

  I went to Phoenix, where for a time I lived off the largess of a friend I had made in Chicago; to Colorado, where I lent my future benefactor twelve dollars to get home to Cheyenne; back to New York, where I jauntily bummed money from guys from out of the past; southward to Baltimore, where I had two bartender jobs, from both of which I was fired for drinking; and finally to that sunny cesspool Miami, where I worked for two hours as a dishwasher but was too weak from not eating to get the big pans clean, and where I was con fronted by that tart-tongued judge and given the choice of coming up with some money or going to the county farm. As I had done so many times over the past months, it was then I telephoned home for help; my mother, correctly surmising that I’d never board the airplane if she sent cash, paid for my plane ticket in Watertown. Not that I minded, but it left me no choice except to go north. On arriving at the farm then, I had little to say to my mother, though I’m certain my silences told

  her many things she’d rather not have heard. Still, she did not insist on words being uttered; and in a way this insulating herself from life’s unpleasanter hues proved kind to me; she let me be, dressing Christie III in sweatshirts, and what I needed for my journey was time.

  My stepfather proved another matter. Ironically, it was not he who provoked me but I who chose to make his days uncomfortable. It was on my part an unwise, intolerant, and thoroughly wrongheaded decision, and one that unquestionably hastened my journey to the madhouse. After Harold’s script had been used and found jolly by the company’s executives, the world’s lunacy had dispersed itself, like the rays of a full moon, flooding every nook and cranny; and for many months I had lived my life without any proper object against which to spiel my fury. Like a man whose enemies, being omnipresent and inexhaustible at the same time, insidiously and outrageously present him with no defined face to bash, rendering him numb and impotent, I was a paranoiac in a state close to crisis. Though I did not then understand this in any utterable way, in an instinctive and very real way I knew that to survive I needed a target, and needed one badly. I chose my stepfather, though I did not strike in any open or head-on fashion. Oh, no! I was much too clever and self-protective for that.

  The nature of my stepfather’s business was such that all his life he had done extremely heavy physical work. As a result he had great hands and a thick, massive upper body, a torso that suggested not only strength but the power to destroy. One day—for God only knows what reasons—I began to see that physical presence as the very abstraction of Babbittry, it seemed to me so astonishing that this great power should have been created in the pursuit of money. Other than the obvious Freudian aspects—a mother, a stepfather, a mother’s grown son under the same roof—I can see now that my baiting him was motivated by nothing other than the guilt I felt at accepting his bed and board. Were he any day going to throw me out onto the street and tell me to go to work, I would have the satisfaction, before he did so, of having confronted him for a long time with a face of unwavering and unmitigated scorn. It never for a moment occurred to me—as it never does to people for whom the world has soured, creating in them the perverse capacity to measure ev
erything and everybody in their own rancid image—that my stepfather had no intention of kicking me out. He was a man of dignity, kindness, and constancy; and, simply stated, he believed in his marriage vows and was accepting me as the “worse” opposed to the “better” the minister had spoken of.

  His composure in the face of my onslaught was admirable, in its way, inexpressible. For weeks I saw him only at supper; and if I said anything to him at all, I said it with elfish and bitchy aloofness: “How’s business?”—pronouncing business as though I were saying turd. Without giving him a chance to answer, I would issue an absurd little chuckle in response to my own question, as though to say, “But, my dear fellow, you can’t really believe that I have the slightest interest in your idiotic business.” He bore all this stoically, smiling good-naturedly; and when I detected that I was unable to arouse him, I stopped talking altogether. Our meals became endless, eye-averting repasts of an almost furious silence, punctuated by the obscene clanks of silver against china, the hideous noise of our masticating and swallowing, and my mother’s obvious and touching attempts to inject conversation. “My, it’s Saturday already—the week’s just flown by.” No response, either in word or gesture. So distressing did these meals become that I eventually stopped eating with them altogether, fleeing to the upper regions of the house whenever I heard my stepfather’s car pull into the drive.