At Sam’s they served sandwiches jammed with a thinly sliced, mouth-melting roast beef; and during the course of the day I consumed three or four of these, with lettuce, salt and pepper, and mayonnaise. Having set cancer’s “sudden loss of weight” symptom, which I knew to be a relatively late one, as my clarion to tell Nature to go screw and put the pistol to my sideburns, I ate hoping to defer that clarion as long as possible. Hence I became the first man in clinical history to put on twenty pounds while “wasting away” of cancer. Cozy with vodka and held in thrall by the ways and means of suicide, I went for hours without pain. But the moment I became hap pily conscious of its absence, it struck. Furiously, mercilessly, it struck, causing me to grab breathlessly at my chest and, for a distracting pang, to hurl myself into the bar’s blunt edge, against which I pressed the humerus of my arm with all the weight and strength in my body. So real was the pain that I strangled for breath, tears of anguish formed in my eyes, and invariably I cursed the arbitrariness of Thanatos, whispering, “I’ll fix you—you obscene, unspeakable shit!”
Following a day when the pain had been particularly acute, and wanting her relaxed when I told her, I sat a pregnant Patience in a chair; and with what in my drunkenness I thought a certain manly aplomb, I related to her the results of my imagined X-rays and the fictional prognosis of the in vented lung surgeon. Twenty-five hundred dollars, I matter-of-factly explained, was needed for immediate lung surgery. Poor Patience, I never loved her as I loved her enduring the pain I gave her at that moment, never felt gratitude like the gratitude I felt at her generous reaction. Of course I could have the money! To whom should she make the check? Oh, God! Who was the doctor? She had to speak to him right away! For when was the surgery scheduled? Where? That I so underestimated her intelligence is the most eloquent statement of how aberrant I had become. Calmly (though somewhat sepulchrally) explaining that my survival chances were the statistical one in twenty, I told Patience I had decided to undergo the ordeal alone, that one had hope (not much, my doleful eyes seemed to imply), and that if things worked out swimmingly, I’d return to her and the yet-unborn child. “You can’t go through pregnancy and my dying at the same time,” I magnanimously suggested. Having made plans to steal Bumpy’s pistol, I was going to take the money and flee to Manitou Springs, Colorado. On my bartender’s day off, I had used to drive there, sit shirt-sleeved on a concrete-and-wooden bench before a tidy green tri angular park, and stare at snowcapped Pike’s Peak rising into the heady blue of a Colorado sky, wondering even then if my life were over and bolting up frequently to walk across the bonelike street to a rustic bar where I drank enough bourbon to dream myself back into life. That was the way, and where, I had decided to spend my final days; and I wanted to have enough money to do so in style, even planning to leave the matronly motel keeper a few extra dollars to clean my brains from her aqua walls. Unfortunately, with an unidentified surgeon operating on a nonexistent lung lesion in a fantasized amphitheater, it abruptly developed that the fees might be hard to come by, that they might, in fact, be impossible. “You could get the money from Bumpy!” I cried. Patience began to weep, terribly, her pregnant body racked with sobs, her nostrils dilating with moisture. “Of course I could,” she said. “Or from Prudence. Or from any number of people. But you’ve got to let us help you!” What saved me at this point of the drunken nightmare I don’t know—Patience’s tears, the subconscious thought of what it was she carried in her, vague memories of the man I might have been. Whatever it was, I never mentioned my “illness” again; and though I did nothing to make it easier for Patience, drinking day and night, I left her alone to come to whatever peace her resources could bring her.
Each morning, with the stealth of a second-story man, I rifled Patience’s pocketbook for twenty dollars, or forged her name to a personal check, and went to Sam’s, where, stolidly cursing Patience for her hardheartedness, I no longer bothered to eat roast-beef sandwiches, drank vodka, stopped talking with strangers, and endured a pain which I am unable to de scribe. After two weeks of unremitting drinking, I awoke at midnight of one room-swimming evening to find that the goblins and the gremlins, the beetles and the bats, had descended en masse and were tearing great chunks of flesh from my body. While Patience (a long way from Bryn Mawr now!) sat rigidly horrified in a chair, I dementedly climbed the walls, tore Venetian blinds from the windows, knocked books from the shelves, and battered furniture to pieces; did this until, exhausted and in a paroxysm of sobbing, I flung myself atop the bed, where for an hour or two, perhaps three, I slept a fitful, haunted sleep. Waking in need of another drink, I poured a triple, then another, and with the third came that short-lived, boozy, fuck-it-all contentment of the drunk. Bumpy, accompanied by two policemen, came the next day and took me away. Even after the Avalon Valley doctors had taken multiple X-rays and assured me my lungs were clear, the pain lingered for weeks into that spring, as if my subconscious were determined to protect me from the thought of Patience or child.
If Dr. K. was dismayed that in only a year’s time I had fulfilled Paddy the Duke’s prophecy and returned to Avalon Valley, he never said so. He said, “What do you want to do?” He meant do with that foul malaise, my life. “Oh, don’t you know?” I said in the most sneeringly self-deprecatory way.
“Don’t you know? I want a destiny that’s grand enough for me! Like Michelangelo’s God reaching out to Adam, I want nothing less than to reach across the ages and stick my dirty fingers into posterity! Want? Why, there’s nothing I don’t want! I want this, and I want that, and I want—well, everything!” Taut with self-loathing, I added, “And, incidentally, that’s my theme song, you know?” Then I broke into song. “Aye, yi, yii, yiii… fair sen-yor-eeee-tah!”
Dr. K. didn’t laugh. Instead, he put me to work. Suspecting that patients were welshing on their jobs, which he felt to be therapeutically vital, he had me make a chart of all of those in our building, together with their hospital occupations. My job was to pick names randomly from the chart and by telephone check on whether they were showing up for work. Though it wasn’t exactly sticking my begrimed fingers into posterity, I enjoyed the sense of power it gave me and I was impressing myself deep into the consciousness of my fellow inmates. Not realizing I was only cursorily spot-checking them, mornings a half-dozen of them would come bearing gifts, packets of cigarettes, Oh Henry! candy bars, Mom’s chocolate-chip cookies, and wanting to know if I couldn’t overlook their not going to work that day. As often as not I accepted the bribe. If the man appeared neat and clean-shaven and I thought he was going to shoot pool or meet a girl in the dugouts of the baseball field for a little hanky-panky (occasionally, I understood, a lot of hanky-panky), I said okay. I hated to take the gifts. Until the last days of her pregnancy Patience came visiting days with cartons of cigarettes and twenty-dollar bills; my mother, sisters, and long-forgotten maiden aunts sent jolly notes of encouragement stuffed with much-used bills; and though he didn’t come to visit me, Bumpy eased his conscience by sending me twenty-five-dollar money orders. Hence there were days when I strolled about the grounds dressed in hospital corduroy and my wallet swollen with sixty or seventy bucks. I took the bribes because I didn’t want it out that a patient’s goofing off was a matter of indifference to me. If the gift-bearer appeared ill-kempt or depressed, and I suspected he was going to sit all day staring at the floor and picking his nose, I said, “No dice, buddy.” Then I essayed a lecture to the effect that if he couldn’t function in the protected world of the hospital, he’d never make it on the outside. Though those who knew me on the outside would have laughed heartily at me garbed in a mantle of self-righteousness, I thought I wore it gracefully and was proud. Not once in the long months of my final stay in an insane asylum did Dr. K. shame me by mentioning the “carcinosis” which had brought me there.
A private room was a highly coveted possession at Avalon Valley, and Dr. K. got me one of these in a building at the south end of the grounds where I was permitted to write on completing my
morning’s checking. Not that Dr. K. necessarily believed I was a writer. Still, he seemed to understand that trying to break and adjust people to what may be an inhuman society is an unwarranted undertaking and that rebellion, in whatever form, is not always an unhealthy enterprise. And so, having my first “immortal” sentence, I began to write, though I fortunately abandoned my tale of “pity” peopled with suave advertising men and crusty clients. For the first time Paddy the Duke’s smug admonition that I had best ask myself what I was doing at Avalon Valley had begun to haunt me, and taking a deep breath, I started fearfully into the past in search of answers. In many ways that book was this book, which I wasn’t then ready to write. Without a thought of organization I wrote vignettes and thirty-page paragraphs about anything and everything I could remember. There are times now when, in nostalgia, I tell myself I’ll never again put down the things I did then, but I know I’m only confusing quantity with quality. If nothing else, I wrote a great deal during those months, writing rapidly, furiously, exultantly, heart-sinkingly, and a manuscript of whatever merit began, page upon page, filling up the suitcase at the foot of my iron cot. When I became tired in the late afternoon, I joined Snow White and Bronislaw (the former had stayed in, the latter had also gone out and been sent back) in a booth at the community store, bought them coffee and pie a la mode, and read to them my day’s torrential output. From Bronislaw I got for my efforts, all during the readings, shrieks of delight and exclamations like, “Oh, ain’t he a fucking bunny!” From Snow White I always got a moody silence during the readings, followed on completing them by either a “pretty fucking good,” at which I beamed with un abashed pleasure, or a “pretty fucking bad,” at which I felt downcast. I always tried to get Snow White to elaborate the latter criticism. But he steadfastly and mutely refused, shaking his head an exasperated no. He was still weary, as weary as I had ever seen him: slouched exhaustedly down in the straight-backed wooden booth, eyes closed, there were times when he was too weary to chew his tobacco and the cud lay for hours, a soggy jawbreaker, between teeth and cheek. Still, I had large love for him and great respect for his intelligence. Whenever he reacted negatively, I always wrote “pretty fucking bad” across the day’s work and fastened the pages together with a paper clip before consigning them to the suitcase. At some future date, I told myself, I’d have to rework or discard those pages. I hadn’t the time then. The past was rushing over me too rapidly. In this way the winter passed; and when one new-green and brilliant spring day I was summoned to the office and told I was the father of twin boys, and though for the benefit of all those present I expressed wonder and joy, I was pleased to see the news affected me not a bit.
On being released from the hospital (I had “beat” them again; even the doctors assumed my sons would instill in me a high and tenacious sense of duty), and on the assumption that Patience, though a durable girl, could not care for three infants simultaneously, by mutual agreement with Prudence our sons were sent to her house and custody until my sense of fatherhood rose to the surface. Until it was too late to do anything about it, it never rose. I was on a writing kick and was by then unable to stay the rush of words. I wrote in joy and in anguish, wrote giggling like a madman and with the tears streaming down my face, wrote at times so exhilarated that I daren’t move for fear of discovering I was incapable of what I seemed to be getting down on paper. I wrote and wrote and wrote, filling up one manila envelope, and then another, and still another, until those envelopes of manuscript, set one atop another, began to look like a scale model for a madman’s cantilevered skyscraper and the thought of an editor’s ever reading through it aroused in me a desire to make a stop. But I could not stop. There was, that summer and fall, something absolutely abandoned about my output, days when I must have slapped down ten, twelve, fifteen thousand words. Patience continued to go out during the day to save humanity. Coming home evenings, she smiled at my exhilaration, fixed me one of her exquisitely sumptuous meals, and listened to me rage and watched me pound my chest. In my new-found sense of accomplishment, I was a veritable chanticleer.
All this was a good deal harder on Patience than she ever said. Though pleased that my book was going well (or perhaps she hated it—who knows?), she lived her week in an agony of apartness, coming miraculously together on Fridays when we drove north to Goldens Bridge to see the boys. Churlishly, I went, too. My reasons for going were perfectly self-centered, having nothing to do with any desire to see my sons. Now that the book was proceeding with such satanic glibness, my main motive—as it is with every psychopath— was to protect myself until it was finished; and in order to do this I had to suggest to Prudence that I wasn’t altogether a monster so as not to get thrown out onto the street, bag, baggage, and manuscript. Having had a lot of practice, I played the game very well and was of good cheer no matter what, smiling amiably in the face of both Prudence’s reproachful glances and her not infrequent inquiries about my job prospects. Taking my sons onto my lap, I kissed them unceasingly; to the matronly cooing of Patience and Prudence (“Isn’t that adorable?” that cooing seemed to say), I tickled and made over them endlessly. I kissed them and caressed them and squeezed them—and, alas, never once did their warmth permeate me. For all I felt, they might have been yarn-haired rag dolls. It was as if I had been pathetically burned and in the process all the nerve ends in my body had been destroyed. And in a way I suppose they had. I had been consumed by the flames of my own reprehensible desire and was living in the terrifying memory of the flames, spending all my waking hours recalling the horror and the dismay, the laughter and the bitterness, of that holocaust I called my life. Not that I mean to imply that a single sentence I had by then put down possessed any merit. This made no difference at all. Even were that manila tower one great edifice of bland clichés and paltry insights, I had no power to restrain myself from adding an other, and still another, floor. Bland or not, it was the only vision I had, I was consumed by it, and I was going for the sky. My sons were dead to me.
When fall came, I had still another reason for going to Prudence’s. In Poughkeepsie I had discovered Fitzgerald’s saloon where, employing an electronic gadget, they were able to pick up a Schenectady channel and get the Giants’ home games, thereby eluding the blackout in the New York area. Each Sunday about noon I dutifully kissed Patience and my sons, smiled apologetically at Prudence, looked anxiously about for Bumpy, who was never there and who seemed to be avoiding me (though I didn’t then know why), got into the car (which I wouldn’t have had access to had I remained in Scarsdale), and began the drive north through my lovely autumn valley. Over the years professional football had become extremely popular, a number of fans from the city had discovered Fitzgerald’s, and the place was always crowded, the cheering high and exhilarating. Surprisingly, though, I myself seldom cheered now. I was still, for I had the power and, no matter how adroitly Gifford handled himself, silently I said to myself, speaking in the direction of the tube, “Have your day, friend. In a matter of months, I’ll be more famous than you.” Nor was this all that difficult to believe. Gifford’s play throughout that season had been characterized—to me, at least—by an embarrassing and painful sluggishness. His timing was bad, nearly wrongheaded. He was dropping passes he once would have caught with ease. He was missing blocks. And against the St. Louis Cardinals he had taken a hand-off from Conerly and had run into the line of scrimmage only to discover—with what must have been a thorny humiliation— that he not only didn’t have the ball but that it had even then been scooped from the turf by a Cardinal defender who was effortlessly making his way to the goal for the winning touchdown. Because of such play there were rumors, some of which saw print, that he had lost both interest in and heart for the game. And though I never believed it, these suspicions were not unjustified. Having his own television and radio shows, his own newspaper column in the Journal-American, his photo in nearly every publication one put one’s hand to, like Joe Di-Maggio or Helen Hayes or Robert Moses, he had wedged a place
in the city’s mentality: he had become unavoidable. As a result, I had for some time suspected that the demands required to keep that wedge firmly entrenched in the city’s skull were costing him dearly by way of conditioning and that the distractions of High Place were literally taking his eye from the ball. Moreover, he was thirty (was it possible?), if not old, aging for a running halfback. Thus it was that where other men saw in his game a lack of interest, I saw only a touching and worried bewilderment. Neither his legs nor his hands— nor, one suspects, even his heart—were doing what they once had done. And if he understood what was wrong, he seemed to be not accepting: youth was passing. Worse than anything, I had for a long time suspected, known really, in the way these things are sometimes known, that the lethargy which had been dominating his play was going to cost him more than the embarrassment of a dropped pass. It was eventually going to cost him physical injury.
A Fan's Notes Page 34
