Pages from a Cold Island

by Frederick Exley

  When at midmorning I went for the New York Times and Daily News, they said hello, with no detectable respect, with in fact an unmistakable irony. Nevertheless, they did say hello. I was too oldl but I had abandoned skivvy shorts and deodorants and my bare feet and bermudas were as dirty as theirs, my face often as unshaven. Perhaps they housed pity for me, taking me for an old fool or a drooling lecher yearning to be at one with them; perhaps with that reservation dictated by the awful division of our ages they accepted me as a kindred spirit who knew that Spiro Agnew was indeed a Mickey Mouse whose proximity—the proverbial heartbeat—to the Oval Office ought by any measure to have made not only the kids but an entire populace drop out. It would flatter me to think they saw me in this latter light. With Beckett (the literary not the historical) I hold it as axiomatic that rather than a deadly sin torpor and sloth comprise a spiritual condition insulating one from life’s crippling hurts called disenchantments, a condition out of which there stands revealed, finally, the heart’s epiphanies. I’d chosen—gone back to—Singer Island because I once again longed to see the world through gauze and to draw sustenance from the closeness of those alienated youth on the hot bright streets beneath me.

  By ten when I arrived with the newspapers at the Beer Barrel next-door, having always to cut a bold swath through the surly kids to get to the door, I’d already been up for hours. For months past I had out of habit risen at six, had put the aluminum kettle on the hot plate for my Tasters Choice instant coffee, had vigorously brushed my teeth (invariably to the threshold of emission from the previous evening’s booze), and had sat at the maple-stained thirty-two-by-eighty-inch door I’d fashioned into a desk. On its gleaming surface, which with a kind of demented lust I constantly waxed with Lemon Pledge, there was nothing save a cheap high-intensity Japanese desk lamp, two ball point pens, the Random House unabridged dictionary, and stacked as neatly as if it were a freshly unwrapped and unsullied ream of yellow second sheets the manuscript of Pages from a Cold Island.

  As easily as a drunken quack detects a cataract but whose shaky skills aren’t up to excising it, I’d known forever at what level the book didn’t work without being able to do anything about it; I’d reached that excruciatingly unhappy impasse wherein I’d once spent an entire week going through it page by page and accomplishing nothing more than attempting to see that that and which were used correctly; my morning time lying asprawl the white Naugahyde couch listening to Brubeck featuring Desmond on alto sax on the stereo had begun to outweigh my time at the desk; my coffee and cigarette consumption were consummate. If from out of this torpor the heart’s revelations were going to manifest themselves, they had, I thought, better do so soon; and when at midmorning as regular as the screeching alarm of a creaky old-fashioned hand-wound clock I felt the booze and caffeine shakes coming on I rose, descended in the elevator to the dark cool lobby, picked up my mail and stuffed it into my hip pocket, stepped squintingly out into the heart-arrestingly dazzling heat, went for the newspapers, thence to the Beer Barrel to begin my morning ritual with Jack McBride, the bartender.

  McBride was thirty, bright, tall and handsome. Girls said he resembled a renowned movie actor who in Technicolor adventure yarns always plays a stoic two-fisted role in which he is never asked to draw on acting talents he doesn’t own; he is in fact an atrocious actor but he does have what in that dim-witted business is called “presence.” Jack did resemble that actor but didn’t much like this being remarked. For years there had persisted a rumor that the actor was homosexual and with the advent of the new permissiveness there was now in circulation a story that he was “married” to a hillbillyishy male television personality, probably, I thought, one of Toni’s tales gleaned from the pages of Midnight. Given to the new styles, Jack wore his black hair long, he sported a luxurious Mexican bandido mustache, and he wore bell-bottomed white-duck hip-huggers with a wide heavy silver-buckled black belt and long-sleeved extravagant-colored satiny shirts with V-necks and sleeves that bloused out at the wrists, which from me elicited, “How can you worry about your resemblance to that fucking swish and wear those fruity shirts?”

  He’d spent three years in the navy and had had two years of college. At the beginning of his junior year, at that point when the bureaucratic “guidance” clerks told him he must decide what he must do and what he must “major” in, he’d dropped out. As he hadn’t the foggiest idea of what it was he must do, it was only a question of time until he found his way to Beach Court where none of us knew that and prided ourselves on being all on a slow boat to nowhere. We employed, quite accurately but affectionately, terms like “wholly mad,” “wonderfully crazy” and “a beautiful yo-yo” to describe each other. On television two days before there had been a story that in Palm Beach Gardens at the north end of the county an eight-foot tall, massive and copiously haired humanoid creature was running wild. He’d been spotted, “confirmed,” and driven raving and roaring into a wooded area by a police or TV station helicopter. The year before he’d been seen in the Keys. He was thought to be working his way up the peninsula (no doubt making his way to the University of Florida at Gainesville for the summer term), and the inhabitants at the county’s north end were cautioned to be on the lookout for him. In sympathy McBride had wanted to get up a posse made up of habitués of Beach Court and find the “poor fellow” before the authorities did.

  “We could chip in and get him a room in the hotel next to Exley’s,” McBride had said.

  Everyone had laughed.

  “Nobody’d notice anything unusual on this flaky block.”

  Everyone had laughed again.

  “All the reaction you’d get around here is, ‘Who’s the new guy in the hotel? The tall one with all the hair.’”

  Some months before I’d got into a mouth-watering conversation about the blandness of the best restaurant food as against home-cooked meals with Jack’s father Alex. Until a droplet of saliva fell onto the back of my hand, we had talked with an eye-narrowing and demented exuberance about roast leg of lamb—”So the skin is drippy crusty,” I’d volunteered, “and you can eat it like meat candy”—mashed potatoes and lamb gravy the texture of lentil soup; sautéed peas, baby onions and fresh mushrooms mixed and simmered together; salads with great chunks of fresh tomato and cucumber and swimming in homemade Roquefort dressing; and hot apple or pecan pie ecstatically topped with fresh whipped cream. For weeks afterwards Alex had invited me to his domicile for just such a meal but as I thought the McBrides lived on the mainland I politely refused. Save when I was “kidnapped” and driven across the causeway to a movie or, between three and five in the morning, carried to drink and to listen to live music at the White Caps, a deafening place without acoustics and frequented by hotel and restaurant help when they got off work, my paranoia wouldn’t permit me to leave the island (“odd things” were “waiting” for me “over there”) and even those infrequent “kidnappings” became conversation pieces the next day on Beach Court.

  “Exley left the island last night.”

  “He didn’t!”

  “He did!” Then inadvertantly I’d discovered the McBrides lived right behind the Beer Barrel on Island Road. I’d at last accepted, and now they found it impossible to be rid of me. Three and four nights a week I was over there shoveling in the heavily gravied mashed potatoes with Alex and his wife Peggie, with Jack and his girl Joanne. We’d even reached that familial easiness wherein I “raced” Jack and Alex through the meal to see who would get to the couch first to watch the television movie. Whoever won invariably fell asleep during the opening credits and commercials and had on awakening to ask “What happened?” to which the reply was also invariably “Nothin.”

  With Jack I now began the day’s ritual. “What’s for supper?”

  “I forgot to ask.”

  “You prick.”

  Pulling myself onto a barstool, I ordered a Budweiser, laid the newspapers out on the bar in front of me, took the mail from my back pocket and placed it next to the pa
pers, then for Jack’s inspection held out my hands, palms face down and suspended in the air a foot or so above the bar. “Steady as a rock,” Jack said. He shook his head in wonder. “Never seen anything like it. Most boozers come in mornings shaking like a leaf, have a couple beers, quiet down and leave. You come in here steady, have a beer, then start shaking.” This was true, and for that reason Jack read and answered my mail for me. He’d just opened the bar; the regulars wouldn’t start drifting in till noon; and the few customers would be tourists who, having saved their pennies and come down from Marshalltown, Iowa, and sitting now atop the loveliest beach in Florida, would come in, drink a draft beer or two, and oddly ask whatever there was to do “around here.”

  Winking at me, Jack would recommend a visit to Lion Country, where the mangy lions seem always to be asleep and snoring (the management claims the animals aren’t tranquilized but the one time I’d taken two little kids there not one of the beasts even conveyed the notion he might be alive and the kids had bawled); to Disneyworld, where in order to explore its inexhaustible and wondrous delights Jack claimed to go on every one of his off days but had in fact never been and probably never would be; or to Frances Langford’s Outrigger Restaurant where, said obliging Jack, they offered for a buck a “mind-blowing” drink containing fourteen different ingredients called a Rooty Tooty Fruity.

  “Loaded with aphrodisiacs,” Jack always added. “Tell ‘em I sent you.”

  I’d finished my first drink and the shakes had started. Having begun, the trembling would need three or four more cans to be quelled. By leaving the newspapers stationary on the bar, I found I could without embarrassment skim them and turn the pages when necessary but I was too ashamed to try and hold and decipher mail in front of strangers. By now Jack had automatically sorted out my bills and thrown them unopened into the green plastic garbage can behind the bar. The first envelope he opened was from my paperback publisher containing a fan missive, which I received at the hardly impressive rate of about thirty a year. Invariably they were from students, and save for the ones from coeds (one never knew) I almost never answered them. Long since I’d discovered that woven into the texture of A Fan’s Notes there was a streak of hauteur I could not isolate from memory; though the letters often began on a note of rather touchingly slavish devotion there seemed always to come a time when the writer, in an abruptly paranoic turn, would say, “Actually, your book wasn’t all that great; in fact, there were places where it was a bunch of shit, and as you probably won’t answer this anyway”—and he was right—”you can go fuck yourself!”

  Today’s letter, though free from this odd desire to inflict hurt, was nevertheless disconcerting. It was from a young man in Billings, Montana, who said that as the sum mer holiday was on us he and a dozen or so “fellow-student literati” in the Billings area had decided to seek me out (“With us,” he wrote, “it has assumed the character of a pilgrimage”), sit at my feet, and let me impart the “Wisdom of Booze” to them. He promised they’d only stay “a week or so” and asked where I was and could they come.

  “Throw it away.”

  “Answer it,” Jack said. “It’s friendly enough. And intelligent.”

  “That’s all we need on this block. A dozen more Montana hippies. Fucking cowboys. They’d probably all be drinking on my tab, and I can’t even afford my own drinks.”

  “You don’t have to put a return address.”

  From the back bar Jack had already removed the unlined white linen tablet he used for the purpose and now held a ball-point pen poised anxiously over it.

  “Okay,” I said. “No address. Take this. ‘Dear Mr. Smith colon paragraph I thank you and your friends for your kind words and genuinely underline genuinely appreciate your interest period However comma and at the risk of appearing a fucking liar comma I do not own a copy of my book and have never kept a single review or fan letter dash even kind ones like yours period Since I last read the book in final page proofs four years ago I have been unable even to look at it comma and I purposely live on a block among goons who either can’t or don’t choose to read period.’”

  Jack laughed.

  “‘I have chosen this seclusion among mushheads in dumb-dumbville because whenever I find myself with someone who has read my book comma he seems sooner or later to start yapping about a book that has nothing whatever to do with me comma and I have no way of accounting for this save for thinking that at the time I wrote it I was some quite other person than the one I am now period new paragraph Thank you again for your kindness period Cordially.’”

  “That’s too cold,” Jack said. “Can’t you put them off with something tongue-in-cheek?”

  “What tongue-in-cheek?”

  “Anything.”

  “Try this. ‘New papagraph: Even were I up to it I couldn’t ask you at this time as I’m leaving this afternoon for California for the summer months period I’ve at last succumbed to the commercial promptings and am going out there to stay at Playboy Mansion West capital P capital M capital W with Hugh Hefner and his girl Barbi Doll Benton and do an original screenplay for the latter and another juicy blond playmate named Angel Tompkins period parenthesis Perhaps you’ve been fortunate enough to see these pulpous morsels featured in the pages of Playboy underline Playboy question mark parenthesis Hefner tells me that both girls quote adored underline adored my book comma that they both yearn for some meaty roles they can get their teeth into comma and that they’ve decided I’m the guy to give them that meat parenthesis no double entendre intended parenthesis period paragraph Hefner assures me that Angel will be on hand in the mansion twenty-four hours a day for consultation and collaboration comma he further assures me that he spends two weeks per month in Chicago on business comma and says that whatever collaboration goes on among Barbi comma Angel and myself during those two weeks is quite up to me period paragraph Certainly you fucking cowboys wouldn’t ask me to by-pass an opportunity like this question mark Cordially comma.’”

  “That’s more like it,” Jack said.

  The next letter began, “Dear Exley, You Fuck!” It was from a Bennington coed with whom I’d exchanged three or four letters. Her last two epistles had been too copious to read; she’d got the conversation away from books and me (I couldn’t permit that!); from what I’d been able to glean skimming them she found college dull, dull, dull and college boys “as insipid as unseasoned summer squash”; and in my last letter I’d therefore come abruptly to the point and asked her what it was she really wanted, with Jack throwing in a few unseemly guesses of his own as to what that might be.

  Together we’d told her that I was rapidly oozing into middle age, that I wouldn’t seduce that many more teenyboppers, and that if she were any good-looking and it were simply a question of getting her youthfully tender clitoris titillated she should refrain from all those excessive literary comparisons of college boys to unsalted squash and get on the next plane to Palm Beach. We told her that I’d long since abandoned youthful sexual inhibitions, would in an oral way induce from her a half-dozen orgasms before even showing her what Jack called “the frightful hog,” and that between the resuscitating respites necessary to a forty-two-year-old man I would then proceed to emit on her teeth, her eyeballs, her breasts, her ass and whatever else she owned she was particularly proud of. Employing the silly-sleazy tone of “personals” in crackpot newspapers, Jack then appended a postscript to the effect that I offered “everything fancy short of accoutrements, including occasionally bringing in the second team in the person of my handsome valet-secretary, John Swinnerton McBride.”

  Her present response excoriated me as a filthy old man, a fact both Jack and I felt our last letter had made manifest. She had, however, enclosed a Polaroid colored print of herself sitting on a beach in a bikini. In an hysterical funk she had scribbled on the back of it, “Is this good-looking enough? you fucking male chauvinist pig! If it is, take a good look—’cause you ain’t getting any!” She was, we had to admit, quite good enough.
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br />   “You going to answer it?” Jack said. “She’s getting loonier by the letter.”

  “Better not,” I agreed. “Sounds like the type who’d get you drunk, wait’ll you pass out, then excise your scrotum with a straight razor.”

  Jack tore her return address from the envelope, threw the remainder of the letter into the plastic garbage can with my bills and the empty Budweiser cans, then scotch-taped the address and the colored print to the red-brick side wall for any of the regulars who wanted to pursue the correspondence.

  The final letter contained a half-dozen copies of my contract and a covering letter from Margaret Mangan, administrative assistant in the Program in Creative Writing, Department of English, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52240. The letter was long and a number of times I had to ask Jack to read parts of it over again. Impatiently he laid the letter down and as if explaining to a child began ticking items off on his fingers.