A Fan's Notes

by Frederick Exley

  Prudence and the children occupied fifteen rooms of the house, and for himself Bumpy kept one spacious room in the basement (“my bachelor’s digs”), to which no one save the kids were admitted, and before entering even they had to knock and give “the password,” which changed from week to week. Opening the door to the timid rap of his seven-year-old daughter, a real beauty, as indeed all the children were, Bumpy would with mock and intemperate gruffness demand, “What you want, Sam?” “Can I come in, Bwana?” The kids called him Bwana. “What’s the password?” Bumpy would ask suspiciously, in the manner of one who knows he’s dealing with an impostor. “San Pietro in Vaticano,” the daughter would whisper, giggling with the relief of having managed the Italian pronunciation. Severely admonishing her not to say anything to “that broad upstairs,” Bumpy would then proceed to make her a grilled-cheese sandwich. Most of this nonsense took place on Sunday mornings before the saloons opened (the only time during the weekend that Bumpy or I saw much of the children or our wives); and thus Bumpy, perhaps attempting to leaven the spice of the intrigue with a little “religious training,” made up passwords related to Christianity. One Sunday the password was Christ’s admonition to “Go … and give to the poor …

  and come and follow me.”

  Like Bumpy himself, his bachelor’s haven was a mishmash. In his half-sized modern blue refrigerator he kept only cans of Budweiser beer and the bread, cheese, and butter with which he made the innumerable grilled-cheese sandwiches that were his sole weekend diet. Atop the equally modern blue electric stove there was always an unwashed and blackened iron frying pan with a blackened, burnt, and crust-curled sandwich in it; and on the desk, table, bookcase, and un made daybed were half-eaten grilled-cheese sandwiches spread with a hot mustard now sickeningly staled to a dung brown, tooth-serrated, brick-hard ruins sitting amidst uncountable empty and half-empty beer cans. A collector of hats, boots, and guns, Bumpy had velvet berets, plastic sun helmets, country gentlemen’s tweed caps, Australian Army field hats, white-hunter hats with leopard-patterned bands, infantrymen’s com bat helmets, ten-gallon cream-colored Stetsons, pyrogravure cowboy boots, glossy black riding boots, motorcycle boots with silver buckles, well-shined paratrooper boots, expensive ski boots, steel-toed workmen’s shoes, twelve-gauge shotguns, thirty-aught-thirties, twenty-twos, M-l’s, a fifty-caliber Thomp son submachine gun, and innumerable pistols lying haphazardly about the furniture and the floor.

  By far the most striking aspect of the room, though, was the walls, no part of which could be seen. Covering them completely were New York State road signs, “snow route: detour,” “state police barracks ahead”; the inevitable “playmates” of the month from Playboy magazine depicting an edible-assed Miss June, or whoever, whom Bumpy had admirably defiled and humanized by drawing pus-running pustules on their sleek behinds or thickets of unseemly coarse hair between their breasts; the original artwork of dozens of bland or unfunny cartoons Bumpy had admired over the years; large poster reproductions of Stalin, Churchill, Lenin, Roosevelt, Truman, Napoleon, Hitler, Disraeli, Trotsky, Commodore Vanderbilt, Eisenhower, and Carrie Nation striking the eeriest and most absurd attitudes (Stalin, for example, in a picture I had never seen, appeared to be rather pensively scratching his nuts); and interspersed randomly throughout all this, action shots from various poster advertisements for Technicolored and black-and-white movie epics wherein mayhem, sex, blood, torture, sadism, and skullduggery had reigned supreme—the bachelor’s pad of a man who had been debauched irreparably by Hollywood, best-sellers, and the advertising racket.

  Most memorable to me were the action shots from the movie Julius Caesar, starring Marlon Brando, James Mason, and John Gielgud, and beneath which Bumpy had Scotch-taped cards bearing excerpts from Shakespeare’s text corresponding with the action of the scene, more often than not incorrectly. Exasperated by one such error, on the first day I met Bumpy and had, sans password, been invited into his sanctum and given a Budweiser, I finally said, “Bumpy, see that picture of James Mason? Well, underneath it you’ve got ‘Et tu, Brute?’“ “So?” Bumpy said. “Well,” I explained, “Mason played Brutus, not Caesar. That caption belongs back there under the one of Louis Calhern with his toga all bloodied and his right arm extended, pointing. Obviously at Brutus.” “Aw, what’s the diff?” Bumpy said, stuffing half a grilled-cheese into his mouth and, after a barely perceptible mastication, beginning to wash it down with a long swallow of beer. Then he looked petulantly at me, as though I were an old spoilsport; then he belched. Embarrassed that my tone had seemed so pedantic, and anxious to rectify it, I said, “Did you ever hear where Brutus put his sword in Caesar?” “No, where?” Bumpy said, coming attentively up on the edge of his chair. “Right in the balls,” I said. “In the balls!” Bumpy cried, jumping to his feet. “In the balls! Oooooohhhhh!” With that eerie cry of anguish Bumpy grabbed himself by his own balls and did an agonized dance of feigned pain about the middle of the room, his stomach joggling up and down like jelly. “In the balls, huh? Where’d ya ever hear that?” “Read it in Plutarch,” I said. “Plutarch, huh?” he said. “Sounds like a real horny book. Have to get ol’ Bumpy a copy of that!” Pleased that “ol’ Bumpy” was no longer upset, I said, “Did you ever hear how Trotsky’s assassination was done?” “Trotsky? Which one’s he?” Christ, I thought, he doesn’t know who he’s got on his walls. “That one over there standing at a lectern, making the typically raving speech of a political animal and apparently picking his nose.” Still on his feet and beginning to leer rapaciously in anticipation, Bumpy decided to guess. “They shoved a Coke bottle up his ol’ bazooka and broke it off?” “No,” I moaned, laughing despite myself. “The story is that the assassin hit him repeatedly on top of the head with a tack hammer.” “Gol dang,” Bumpy said admiringly. “You must be some reader, knowing all that stuff!”

  When Patience and I returned to Goldens Bridge the following weekend, Bumpy couldn’t wait to get me into the cellar to show me the changes he’d made in the walls. Over Trotsky’s head he had placed a cartoonist’s version of a thumb and forefinger gripping a huge tack placed for driving into the top of poor Trotsky’s dome. Beneath a bloodied bandage the thumb was blue and swollen from the repeated misses of the unseen and incompetent carpenter, and above the head a gigantic hammer was bearing irrevocably down with such merci less force that Bumpy seemed intent with this one awful blow to drive the tack all the way down into the raving Trotsky’s intestines. Laughing appreciatively, I said, “A tack hammer, Bumpy—not a tack!” “Aw, what’s the diff,” Bumpy said, giving me that pouty look. What he had done with Plutarch was rather more fetching. Refusing to accept the fact that Louis Calhern had played Caesar, he had a picture of a toga-ed James Mason lying on his side with a dozen bloodless car toonist’s swords sticking out of him, some appearing to have no more than broken the skin. Though obviously in his death throes, the old scalawag still had a pinch of life in him, one eye was open, and in what presumably was a rather irritated after thought, Bumpy had the man who bestrode “the narrow world like a colossus” saying, “Hey, Brutus, ol’ buddy, didya have to get me in the balls?”

  Though I wasn’t to reciprocate it for years, or even understand that I cared to reciprocate it, Bumpy fell passionately in love with me the first day of our meeting, the day which was to set the Sybaritic tone for so many future weekends. On Saturday, after the horny jokes Bumpy had “stored up” for me during the week, two cans of Budweiser, and a grilled-cheese sandwich, Bumpy would suddenly look at his watch and ex claim, “Gol dang, it’s getting late! Let’s go for a drive!” Rakishly attired in his leopard-banded, white-hunter’s hat; his silver-buckled, motorcyclist’s boots; a pair of well-faded, rear-accenting Levi’s; and a khaki hunter’s parka on the breast of which were slots for shotgun shells, Bumpy, belly out, would purposefully lead me to the garage where, ignoring three shiny new cars, we’d climb into a hard-used Ford Ranch Wagon. In the back of this wagon were loaded rifles of various calibers, the omnisc
ient remains of sandwiches, and a couple dozen cardboard quart containers for bulk ice cream, empty now and floating as lightly as feathers as the wagon thundered and joggled over the sinuous, narrow Westchester highways. Stopping at the Rendezvous Restaurant a half-mile down on Route , Bumpy, The White Hunter in Suburbia, would

  disembark and strut in. Presently returning with two ice-cream containers full of draft beer, he’d hand me one, pile in, and off we’d go, invariably discovering at the first curve we negotiated that the beer’s froth had spilled onto our laps.

  Retrospectively, I see Bumpy and me on those weekend afternoons and early evenings as stopping over at every bar, saloon, and restaurant in north Westchester, from Pound Ridge on the east to Armonk on the south, from Yorktown Heights on the west to Brewster on the north, bars in which Bumpy was loathed, patronized, and feared; held in amusement, contempt, and awe; but never—no, never—really liked. Constantly he punctuated this shuttling between bars with an abrupt screeching of brakes. Furiously wheeling the wagon to one side of the highway, Bumpy would reach in the back and grab one of the rifles, jump out, take split-second aim, and shoot squirrels, rabbits, crows, and—to my dismay and repeated warnings that we’d end in jail—stray cats, which he despised. In his youthful, less moderate days he had killed them by injecting pure iodine into them with a hypodermic needle (before dying, Bumpy told me with considerable amusement, the cats had endured excruciating pain and had gone into flip-flopping fits) or by tightly joining their tails together with wire and dropping them over a clothesline where they’d clawed each other to death. Suffering himself few restraints and fewer social niceties, and perhaps thinking that, being married to Prudence’s sister, I nourished notions of what was expected of a host, on the first day Bumpy took me on a rapid tour of the nearest village of any size, Katonah. Explaining that spelled backward it was named after an Indian, Chief Hanotak (Was Bumpy kidding me? another Mr. Blue?), he showed me the New York Central station where he got his train to Manhattan, Weinstein’s Drugstore where he got the glycerin suppositories for his chronic constipation, a haberdashery where they had “terrific” belts for his proud girth, the public library where he got nothing at all, and, set high on a green sloping hill, a school which was merely a red brick school, though it did have, and I don’t know why, a quaint white wooden belfry topping it. Among all these “sights,” Bumpy repeatedly pointed out property he owned and which, now The Texas Cattleman, he invariably designated as “one of mah spreads,” one of which was a dilapidated corner grocery with rain-faded candy-bar and rusted Coke signs tacked to its unpainted facade, and from which, accord ing to Prudence (and she’d have known!), Bumpy never collected any rent.

  The tour took no more than twenty minutes, and, having finished our containers of draft, we were driving out a tortuous road headed for the nearest saloon when Bumpy pointed at a nondescript piece of land carpeted with anemones and conifers and matter-of-factly said, “That’s where Scott Fitzgerald’s wife Minerva got burned up in the nuthouse fire.” “Zelda!” I cried, and “Where?” I cried, and “Stop the car!” I cried. Impatient to move on even before the motor had begun to idle, Bumpy said, “What ya lookin’ for? There’s nothin’ here now.” “A road,” I said, upset and terribly abstracted. “There must be a road!” “There ain’t nothin’,” Bumpy assured me with finality. “Nothin’.” Without being in the least conscious of it, the words rose up within me; and somnambulantly, as though in a crushing, heavy-aired dream, I quoted, aloud: “I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanitarium.” That is the moment I score as the one Bumpy fell irremediably in love with me. A mental brute, Bumpy wouldn’t have been capable of articulating what so moved him about the line; but move him it did, and from that day forward, like a child forever demanding the repetition of a favored fairy tale, Bumpy would say pleadingly, “Tell me that line about Minerva.” Zelda,” I’d exasperatingly correct him. “C’mon, Bumpy, you know that line. You’ve already had me repeating it till I’m going barmy.” “Naw, I don’t—honest,” Bumpy would assure me. “I don’t remember it. Besides, tell me the way you say it!” So I’d repeat it, afterward studying him to see if his gray, agate-like eyes had misted over as usual. Abruptly trying with brashness to cover what he, this Boom-Boom Bwana, must have deemed his lapse of manliness, he’d bellow, “Gol dang! You sure know everything, don’t ya? Gol dang!” Watching him so worry and wag his weak head with wonder, I never bothered to tell Bumpy that Fitzgerald’s line was hardly an esoteric one.

  Bumpy’s courtship of me began in earnest the following week when I received from New York a post card and a package that were to set both the precedent and the tone for Bumpy’s weekly wooing of me. “Ex!!!” the card read.

  “Am sending book the swishy clerk told me was horny as Hades! Skimmed thru it and found guy diving in bush on page 3! Have marked same! Wow! Hope you like it! See you Saturday?” He had signed the card, as I, later discovered he answered the phones at both his office and his home, “Bumpy here!!!” The package contained the latest best-seller. Patience was pleased. She said, “I guess you’ve really got yourself an admirer.” “It appears that way,” I said, giving her the best-seller to read. “Well, well,” she said. “Thank you, Bumpy.” She laughed. Many weeks later, in a pensive mood, she said, “I’m glad about Bumpy, really glad.” She was glad, too. “Why are you glad, Patience?” “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “His parents died when he was only two or three and he’s always been such a fat lonely boy—and, I might add, one with a decidedly cruel streak. You might do him some good. I think he wet the bed till he was a sophomore in college.” “That would have been about his tenth year in college, wouldn’t it?” I said, and Patience laughed appreciatively. We were eating one of her exquisitely prepared dinners of lamb chops cut from the loin, baked potatoes topped with sour cream, asparagus, and an Italian salad. When we had finished the apple Huguenot and were sipping our coffee and lighting cigarettes, I said, “How did Bumpy’s parents die—in a plane crash or what?” “Plane crash, heck,” Patience said. “Don’t listen to any of those stories. It’s an absolute thing with Bumpy. They died right over here on Greenwich Avenue in Greenwich. Bumpy’s father swerved the car to miss a cat and ran into a street lamp. There wasn’t a mark on either of them —oh, a couple bumps on the head—but they were both sure as heck dead.” “A cat?” I said. “A cat, huh? Then Bumpy’s father wasn’t a test pilot?” “Test pilot,” Patience cried. “Lord, that’s a good one! From what I’ve heard all he was was a drunk with enough money to bully anyone, including Bumpy’s mother, whom he is said to have treated like dirt, once knocking a couple of her teeth out right at the bar of the Pickwick Arms Hotel in Greenwich. They say that a little bit of a man, a stranger, once beat him half to death in the very same bar and that the patrons rose en masse and applauded.” Patience paused for a breath, trying to determine whether her tone should be harsh or sympathetic. “He loved cats, though,” she said. “And he sure as heck proved the maxim about being destroyed by what one loves.”

  Every Wednesday or Thursday I received the post card and the package containing the latest masterpiece of Ayn Rand, Sloan Wilson, Grace Metalious, the Irvings—Wallace and Stone—and what must have been the works of every writer in the Grove Press stable. No matter how much I protested his generosity to Bumpy, or told him if he had to send something I’d much prefer mysteries, he wouldn’t hear of it, explaining that, “Wanting to be a writer and all, you should read good stuff—maybe you’ll learn somethin’! If only how to dive in the bush! Har! Har! Har!”

  Weekends in the bars Bumpy introduced me to bartenders and acquaintances with the pride of a lecherous octogenarian presenting a young and ravishing bride. He’d beam salaciously. “This here’s my brother-in-law. He’s a writer! There ain’t nothin’ he don’t know!” Soon I understood that, though I wasn’t expected to volunteer mots, with the wisdom of eternal woman I was expected to arbitrate barroom disputes and have at my fingertip
s such esoteric information as what Yankee pitcher’s World Series no-hitter had been under mined by the Dodgers’ Cookie Lavagetto, the populations of pre-and post-World War II Warsaw, and the number of is lands comprising the Republic of Indonesia. During a lull in the conversation, Bumpy once called me into the floodlighted downstage area. “Tell these swine that line about Minerva,” he said. “Now, listen here, Bumpy,” I said; but before I could prevent him, he was priming the audience for the showstopper, explaining how Minerva was in the “bughouse” and how Scott Fitzgerald, “you know, the writer,” wrote this “gol dang great line” in a letter. “Now, tell them,” he ordered. My face red, my eyes cast downward, I obediently mumbled the words for fear of being taken for a damp-souled, unaccommodating chap. “That ain’t the way he usually says it!” Bumpy excoriated me to my audience. In the station wagon going to the next bar, I said, “Bumpy, you’ve got to stop this nonsense about my being a writer and making me repeat that Fitzgerald line. In the first place, I’ve never had anything published. In the second place, it’s embarrassing as hell. I mean, I suppose every one of those guys has heard that line before.” I wanted to add, “Everyone’s not as finger-lickin’ uncouth as you.” “You’re absolutely right,” Bumpy agreed, but his agreement had nothing to do with anything I’d just said. “Lines like that are just wasted on swine like those guys. They’re not like us— sensitive and all.”