A Fan's Notes

by Frederick Exley

  By three o’clock we had left Louis’ and were walking south on Macdougal Street to her apartment, which she had told me was just south of Bleecker. Though it gives me no particular pride, as I walked I was debating whether to give her a fuck. The streets were deserted, but the moon was good and everything was clear. I to the inside, she to the curb, we were walking in silence. Suddenly understanding that, in the same way I understood her too well, she understood me not at all, in embarrassment I had stopped talking altogether. Presently two men came walking up the street toward us. Both were well-dressed, one a Negro, the other not. With their heads down, they walked rapidly, and talked, both at the same time and with that peculiar intensity which suggests the great world’s heartaches are all but put to rest. I heard the names Ayme and Kerouac and Edmund Wilson and Ginsberg and Pope and had to laugh, wondering by what juxtaposition of logic these names could so rapidly succeed one another in a conversation. On top of us they still had not seen us, and the white man bumped joltingly into the girl, scarcely nodded his head in apology or even interrupted his monologue, and proceeded blithely on his way. Then I did a foolish and impulsive thing, hardly knowing at the time why. I now know that I felt this girl, even if I didn’t like her, had been hard used enough—in the way my wife and sons had—by people like themselves, like Big Red, like me, people who brushed others into the gutter with no more thought than if they were dung. They re minded me of me, and I despised them for that. Turning, and with the girl tugging at ray arm and beseeching me not to bother, I called, “Hey, creep!” When they did not hear that, I made it, “Hey, nigger lover!” They heard that, freezing in mid-step, two silhouettes of rage against the Village night. And I laughed. And the fight was on.

  We had words in which I insisted on an apology to the young lady, and in turn the white man insisted I reciprocate by withdrawing that vile appellation. But I couldn’t. In his voice was the hysterically cultivated outrage of the white liberal; and I loathed his patronizing what he unquestionably deemed my brutal and irremediable ignorance—I who under stood, or thought I did, more about the Negro and dignity and second-class citizenship than he would ever understand. Smiling to indicate my agreement to the childish bargain, I listened to his rather sullen apology to the girl, drew in a deep breath, and in the most despicable tone I could muster, said, “Now get your faggoty ass out of here!”

  It was a statement to which each reacted according to his character. The girl fled, running like hell, so that for a long time after I could hear in the clear November air the slap, slap of her sandals along Macdougal Street. Having removed his spectacles and trembling with rage, the white man was now being constrained by the Negro’s hand held laxly before his waist, the way a policeman constrains a child at a parade. When I looked into the Negro’s eyes, I saw that he was asking why? He had heard the terrifying, the unfathomable loathing in my voice; and as intelligent Negroes understand, he had sensed that that loathing had nothing to do with him or his people, that it rose up from deep disappointments within myself—from my own defeats and degradations and humiliations. “Why?” his eyes asked me; and because I knew the answer all too well, I said to the white man, “C’mon, nigger fucker!” He came at me very fast, running so rapidly and so furiously that I panicked. I was standing at the corner of a side street, Minetta Lane, and immediately started a wild back tracking into the lane, trying to think of a way to protect myself. In high school I had broken my arm and for many months had borne it in a thick cast, often thinking at the time what an exemplary weapon it would make. That is what I thought of now. Retreating as far as I could without tumbling backward, I abruptly stopped, set my legs wide apart, doubled my right arm at the elbow, and with all the strength in my body threw the arm even as he came rushing headlong on, catching him with my upper forearm flush in the nose. It was perfect. I felt so many things go in his face that I almost became sick. But still he fought. He hit me three or four times, hard, on the cheek and on the ear and on top of the head, by which time his blood was flowing profusely down the front of his white raincoat. Noticing it, he stopped as suddenly as if we had been rehearsing a movie scene. Bewildered and horrified, he felt his face with his hands. Then he sat down on the sidewalk, leaned against the side of Minetta’s Restaurant, and began to whimper, still bewilderedly holding his face.

  The Negro was not so easy. He had seen his friend in agony and had forgotten about reasons why. Standing toe to toe, we threw unexpert, pathetically angry blows at each other’s eyes and ears and mouth and chest and stomach; threw them, our arms flailing the Village night like furious billy clubs, until the entire upper part of my body was numb with rage; threw them until I could no longer lift them and stood, helpless, taking his weary, scarcely felt blows. And though they say one loses his head in a fight, mine was clear; and I was trying to answer the question that he, who even now struck me in the face, had posed to me: why? I fought for a reason I would discover the ensuing spring—because I had had that day an awful glimpse of my own mortality. I fought because I had gone back to both Clarke’s and Louis’—had gone back to the past and had found that the past did not exist. And I fought because in J.’s eyes I had seen the truth of what I had become and knew that he would never again invite me to conspire against exclusiveness. Yes, it was a lament, this fight, a lament for a conspiracy—for both my conspiracy with J. and that other conspiracy against anonymity begun so many seasons before and ended that very day; so that even as I took this black man’s blows I could see that broken, blue-and-silver figure, stretcher-borne. And I fought for still a final reason, perhaps the most important reason of all. I fought—

  Now the white man was rising, ready to do battle again. Fearing that together they might literally kill me, I slid out from under one of the Negro’s now open-handed swats, fled into Macdougal Street, turned north, and started to run. I ran until the sweat, having already rendered my jacket heavy as wet rags, formed pools in the sockets of my eyes and I could not see, sweat that there mingled with the tears and blood to run down my hot, steaming cheeks; ran until I thought my head would explode and my chest consume itself in flames; ran until my legs became wobbly, then mush, and I could run no more. When I finally stopped, I was on Seventh Avenue, many blocks north. Seeing they were not behind me, I staggered into the entrance of a closed drugstore and lay face down on the filthy concrete, the sweat streaming down my neck and dropping in great drops onto the pavement, lay with my head resting heavily on my crossed arms. In a moment I would fall asleep. But before I did, all the dread and the dis may and the foreboding I had been experiencing disappeared, were abruptly gone, and I felt quiet. They disappeared be cause, as I say, I understood the last and most important reason why I fought. The knowledge caused me to weep very quietly, numbly, caused me to weep because in my heart I knew I had always understood this last and most distressing reason, which rendered the grief I had caused myself and others all for naught. I fought because I understood, and could not bear to understand, that it was my destiny— unlike that of my father, whose fate it was to hear the roar of the crowd—to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others. It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan.

  8 / A Dream of Sanguinary Ends

  A week after I was at the Yankee Stadium, when my face had healed to the point of being recognizable, I got up from the davenport, packed a satchel, and made my second journey to Florida. It was a trip for which I felt exiguous warmth; and one to which, materially or emotionally, I could bring equally little viaticum. Having discovered within me a love for my sons, I had found myself (can one love the children and not the mother?) looking at my wife in a way I had never before looked at her. Though I may not have sought her in the rock-ribbed way women prefer to be sought, before I left I yearned to make her an appreciative gesture for the clothes on my back, for the food in my belly, for the comfort of my bed, for the bright white paper and the sparkling-keyed typewriter, for the uncomplaining months when she must have hoped the book would be spawned if
only because it might free me from myself. I wanted to thank her for my sons.

  Had I been able to give Patience that book, I know that I could have balmed myself with the notion—as “real” writers do when, dedicating the work, they write, This book is for Margie Bean, in memory of endearments deep and true—that I had in a way met the price. It wasn’t so much that Patience had volunteered everything material to our relationship as that I had been unable to give to wife or sons the emotional nourishment they coveted. The malaise of writing—and it is of no consequence whether the writer is talented or otherwise—is that after a time a man writing arrives at a point outside human relationships, becomes, as it were, ahuman. During those months spent at the luridly lighted writing table, I had, paraphrasing Yeats, fed the heart on fantasies; and the heart, quite simply, had grown brutal from the fare. To thank Patience I composed a pastiche—

  You gave me bread, you gave me meat,

  You gave me lots of real swell stuff to eat;

  The trouble was, I’m sure you’ll agree,

  Le Poussin en Surprise never sat well with me

  —but for the obvious reason I never made her a present of it. While during the day she was with such feverish compassion refereeing the nearly mortal conflicts of her marital combat ants (in the last report I prepared, the husband accused the wife of getting pie-eyed and punching his Mom in the nose while his son and daughter, aged seven and six respectively, stood by ecstatically applauding the action), I wanted to cook up a sumptuous repast of roast loin of pork, wild rice wrapped in banana leaves, and pencil-thin asparagus, capped off with a bottle of La Tache . After purchasing the wine, I passed an afternoon judging its “bouquet” and “body” and in an excessively fastidious script copying out a grocery list for Mr. Gristede. By 4 p.m., cheeseburgers “with,” French fries, and coleslaw were sounding every bit as delectable. But before I could get around to preparing these I fell asleep on the davenport, the empty bottle of La Tache still on the coffee table beside me. Such were the heart’s calluses that out of my gratitude to Patience I could not in the end put together the movements necessary to walk to the sink, to buss her on the cheek, and to volunteer to dry the supper dishes. Our relationship had become an unending and distant Viennese waltz. To yank her abruptly to me and drift off into a plaintive, hot-panted fox trot would have disarmed her. My battered face proved the ultimate barrier between us.

  Improvisedly casting her face into a mask of amiable diffidence, she’d look at me, then look hurriedly away, leaving me no doubt that the swollen blue bruises told her of the violence yet within me and how far she still was from having her sons with her. One welcome morning I looked into the bathroom mirror and said, “Is it you, Exley?” “Such as I am,” the mirror suavely replied. I planted an affectionate, lingering kiss there, lightheartedly announced to Patience that I was going back on the road, “Colorado or someplace,” and Patience’s response made me rue that I hadn’t found it in me to complete some gesture of thanks. For the trip she wanted to buy me a badly needed raincoat; and I instantly understood that she had sym pathetic visions of my standing on some lonely crossroads in the rain, waiting for the ride to wherever it was I thought I was going. Not waiting for the coat (which undoubtedly would have been a London Fog from Lord & Taylor), I packed my bag in a fury of encroaching tears. A few hours later, drunk, I was on a Greyhound going to Miami Beach to see the Counselor.

  During that torporific endless ride I wrote Patience a letter I never mailed. On reading it in the glaring sun of Florida, I found it maudlin and senseless. It was, besides, painfully pretentious; and I quote now from what I remember of it, embarrassed for the ninny who wrote it. Whether I had talent, I told her, was beside the point. Unfortunately I had developed a characteristic of talented people—the need to stand up to the practical and incredulous world, that world which as sails one with its laughing and disbelieving eyes, that world which stands so vigilantly prepared to stigmatize one for his harmless, inflated dreams as mad. “Whether or not I am a writer,” I wrote, “I have—and this is both my curse and my virtue—cultivated the instinct of one, an aversion for the herd, without, in my unhappy case, the ability to harness and articulate that aversion.” I told her how once in Chicago, through the window of a streetcar, I had on North Clark Street seen a young man passed out on the sidewalk and snoozing in the bright sunshine. He was atrociously dressed, his face haggard and bewhiskered, and people walked over and around him as though he did not exist, as perhaps for them he did not. At the moment my streetcar pulled directly beside him, it stopped abruptly, I looked down into his re posing face, and there I saw my own face with such devastating and chilling clarity that for the rest of the day I had suffered an exaggerated thirst accompanied by vertigo. “For my heart,” I wrote, “will always be with the drunk, the poet, the prophet, the criminal, the painter, the lunatic, with all whose aims are insulated from the humdrum business of life. A raincoat? That a raincoat could solve my problems! Would it have come from Lord & Taylor? I say this truly, Patience: never again in my life will I feel easy in anything but the cheapest corduroy, the corduroy that calls up the odors and the tastes, the laughter and the tears of Avalon Valley. Could I have accepted your belief that I was wasting my life, could I have promoted ideas without substance, products without value, cigarettes that kill, could I have sat all shiny-faced and regimental necktie in the carpeted skies of Manhattan and joshed myself that I was engaged in things consequential, then we might have laughed and loved and joined the Westchester Country Club and lived forever. I couldn’t do it.” To this letter I never mailed I affixed this postscript: “With me you were very patient, Patience. And good, too. In that goodness I was aware of the dignity you were affording my shabby humanity; indeed, dwelling in it I at times felt something like grace. Not that it matters, but I tried to think of a way to repay your generosity; and such payment invariably settled on the truth that you’d be better rid of me. Be happy and tell my sons that I was a drunk, a dreamer, a weakling, and a madman, anything but that I did not love them.”

  In the company of a golden-thighed, pneumatic, and heart-stoppingly glowing dancer in one of the chorus lines along the beach, the Counselor was on an extended leave from The Law. When from Scarsdale I untruthfully wired him that I had been “streeted” from the apartment and asked if I might come down, there was little he could say but come ahead. His permitting me to come was an error. With luxurious living I was swollen at the joints, like Proust I had begun to claim the privileges of the valetudinarian, I was morose mentally; and it was no time before that moroseness, in a rather rum way, seeped into the atmosphere. The Counselor tried to get me swimming and taking the sun, but I couldn’t bear to sit among the aging, flaccid bodies on the beach because already my body was beginning to resemble those of the elders. I wanted to drink, and being both my friend and an accommodating fellow, the Counselor eventually allowed that he would drink with me. By this time the Counselor had been some weeks away from his practice, he was without funds, and our booze and our beds depended entirely on the handsome salary of the dancer who, prior to my arrival, had got some idea about the Counselor’s setting up practice in Florida and keeping house with her. What the girl hadn’t bargained for was me. During the months I had permitted Patience to assume the man’s role of supporting me, I had unmanned myself: I had become infantile. My sleek cheeks had grown flatulent, my girth fatty, my thin hand plumper than that of a thriving child’s; so that the dancer, suddenly and miraculously, had not only a common-law husband but a fat, cuddly, and altogether helpless infant, the latter of which, alas, she wanted no part. She was a lovely, garrulous, exciting, and excitable girl; could make a most savory meat loaf; and about the sexual habits of famous entertainers had all sorts of tales she managed to con vey in such vivid detail that it never occurred to us to ask where she had gathered such information. Having spent her dewy-eyed years being mauled by drunks in two-bit night clubs, she yearned for muslin curtains and the smell of things b
aking; but for the life of her she couldn’t conceive how my pursy, davenport-prone body fitted into such home-cooked visions. The Counselor tried to explain it to her.

  “Freddy is our son,” he’d offer in mock protest to her demands that I get my fat ass off the davenport and out looking for work. “Our baby,” he’d protest, sticking out his tongue and elfishly rolling his eyes around in their sockets. “Isn’t he an adorable little fatty-watty?” Then the Counselor and I would giggle and pour ourselves another drink from the bottle purchased with the money earned by those thrilling legs. “Our baby,” the Counselor would repeat for emphasis, and again those eyes would go flitting about their sockets. He’d sigh and wag his head with weary and resigned exasperation; heavy with responsibility he was. Only he, that mock head-wagging seemed to say, understood the burdens of raising children.

  I never ceased to marvel at the Counselor’s relationship with women. Though he had reverence for them, he never had any understanding of the homey things that hypnotize then and wasn’t truly happy unless he and the girl were running helter-skelter on the edge of the abyss: the Counselor wanted them to gather some glimpse of what hell permanent relationships can be. Two nights before Christmas the dancer tumbled into the abyss. Beginning with some harsh and ferruginous clanging of pans in the kitchen, to which the Counselor snapped, “Quiet, hon, you’ll wake the baby,” the scene ballooned to encompass a flashing butcher knife, a broken kitchen window, the wail of a police siren. Having fled the hysteria, the Counselor and I stood among some moon lit orange trees in the back yard, dramatically wringing our hands and looking at each other with feigned and horrified dismay, as though quite unable to imagine what had sent the poor girl round the bend. “And after all we’ve done for her,” the Counselor said. That night she moved out and into an apartment with some fellow chorines. By Christmas Day the Counselor and I were without money, beer, cigarettes, or food and were forced to dine off some cookies, wrapped in brilliant gold and silver paper, with which our late hostess, in one of her jollier moods had thoughtfully decorated the Christmas tree. Attempting to ease our financial predicament, we had the night before telephoned the two Watertownians we knew in the Miami area, high school classmates who had fled both the cold and the responsibility of families. Offering to help, the first was extremely solicitous, his voice nearly breaking in sympathy with our plight. He was beautiful. Fearing that he might not find our apartment, he ordered the Counselor and me to stand in front of a drugstore he knew on Collins Avenue. Before telephoning him again, we waited three hours. Without any explanation his “wife” said he’d simply changed his mind about helping us, at the moment was taking a bath in preparation for midnight Mass, and couldn’t be disturbed.