Pages from a Cold Island

by Frederick Exley

  And now, of course, Mailer is embarked on a campaign to garner himself the Nobel Prize. He wants us to believe that he possesses the generosity of spirit, the largeness of vision, the striking courage of a Faulkner, Mann or Solzhenitsyn, or for that matter the relentless dedication of an Edmund Wilson or the sheer genius of a Nabokov who never won the prize. Mailer opened his Prisoner of Sex waiting for a call from the wire services with the probable announcement that the prize was his; he modestly assured his gentle reader that he was sure the wire services had made an egregious error (indeed they had, indeed they had!), but he was unable to convince his new secretary who appears to have been transmogrified into a walking, talking mass of awe-stricken, admiring and gushy mush that Norman could take the whole business so cavalierly; and sadly, oh very sadly, we are left with the impression that Norman would not have been all that surprised had the wire-service man been right.

  Even recognizing that he was nursing this kind of oppressive vanity. I could not guess he’d come to write about the lost and pathetic Marilyn Monroe, or that in the process he would make the great Arthur Miller, whose Death of a Salesman will be lighting up the world’s theaters when Norman’s books are being recycled to print Miller’s words, an arch villain, or that he would seek to enlist our sympathy for his choice of subject matter by telling us—for Jesus Almighty’s sake!—that he needs two hundred thousand dollars a year to live on. But one might have guessed as much.

  Around the corner the preliminary bouts were already under way, both the bar and the tables were beginning to empty, and I had about decided he wasn’t going to make it after all when I sensed an imposing presence behind me and heard, spoken to Ray with funereal gravity:

  “My party is ready.”

  I couldn’t help it, I started to laugh. Turning, I saw that it was this Quinn, the heavyweight boxing champion of the Corps, whom I didn’t then know but who appeared to have way too much Irish-guy niceness to take a steak repast with Mailer so solemnly. Fluttering nervously, perspiring and wiping his brow with a handkerchief, he was an outsized Irish cherubim announcing the Second Coming.

  Then the procession began, and in its ritualistic majesty it made the National Institute of Arts and Letters ceremony look like a thing of scant consequence, as pale as the talc hue of the great Stokowski’s head. All together there must have been a dozen or fifteen of them—even including a priest I assumed was going to bless Norman’s cauliflower—and as they filed behind me I noticed there was something utterly pilgrimatic or apostolic in their demeanors, that try as they would to glide nonchalantly by they were quite overcome by a ludicrous earnestness, a stealthy determined sense of importance, a kind of wait-till-you-see-who’s-behind-me thing. And finally, a full thirty seconds—and what a theatrical effect this delay had—after the final disciple, He came!

  Accompanied by his then wife Beverly, who was lovelier than I’d been led to believe from the single photo I’d seen of her, with dark taffy-colored hair, a peaches complexion and an outfit to match, Mailer was a good deal smaller than I’d thought, and thinner than in his recent pictures, though not thin enough for the vested—it made him look roly-poly—lightweight suit he was sporting. But here was his graying, kinky, pseudo-Afro hairdo and unlike the others his petite candy kiss of a mouth was giving off a smile, he was enjoying himself, which made me want to shout at his table, “Hey, you guys, look at Norman! He’s smiling, you can smile now!”

  I don’t know why I stayed, but I did; and against a hundred resolutions not to, I found myself looking at his table, not much liking what I saw and wondering if ever again there’d come a time for him when he and his wife could slip into some corduroy slacks, some old and comfortable cashmeres, have a couple of beers and a ham and cheese sandwich at the bar of Chumley’s, then walk round the corner and see a fight together. I doubted there would. Mailer had made himself a literary Frank Sinatra, and where one could understand an egomaniac from Hoboken summoning and discharging flunkies to and from his private table way out yonder there in that ultimately vulgar American dreamland of Las Vegas, Mailer yet owned something of brilliance, places in his recent work had taken on a com passion I hadn’t heretofore suspected him capable of, and at that moment he obviously housed the inner resources not to have to live his life, as it were, en entourage. And I knew then that, despite my grudging respect for some of his work, I couldn’t like the guy, and that he’d never deliver on the promise he’d made us “lesser” talents.

  Yet I persisted. At his table they were still sipping cock tails, and I implored Ray, before the steaks arrived, to get him and bring him to the bar so I could buy him a drink. Ray pointed out the obvious—that Mailer had probably never heard of me—but I countered with the truth that I didn’t expect to confront him as an equal. “Just give him my name —I’ll play the lickspittle—tell ‘im I’m a votary, and ask him if he couldn’t spare the time it takes to quaff a single drink. Christ, Ray, you’re in this business, you know how to handle this corny fucking New York scene.”

  “What do you want to talk with him about?”

  I was becoming bored. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ray, who knows? Maybe I’ll ask him if he’s got an anal hang-up. He’s always got his heroes shoving it up some broad’s fanny.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Ray snapped. “I ain’t even goin’ to introduce yuh!” And for good measure: “Peckerhead!”

  But Ray did. On his way out Mailer pulled up behind me, shook hands with Ray, thanked him for a lovely meal. I’d swung round on my barstool so Ray couldn’t avoid me, and at the last possible moment he asked Mailer if he’d met me. We shook hands, and Mailer introduced me to his wife. He was, as people had so often told me, very much the gentleman (though with equal sincerity I’d heard as many stories about what, if true, could only be deemed a strident cruelty), speaking in a very low-keyed voice weirdly compounded by the staccato word-biting of the born Brooklynite, as though his vocal cords, quite independently of anything he was willing, were attempting the impossible feat of staying attuned to his acutely febrile cerebrum.

  “You did well with your book.”

  “So-so,” I said.

  “Your editor sent me a copy but I haven’t had a chance.” He shrugged. “I’ve been, you know, sort of busy lately.” He had of course been running and resoundingly defeated in the city’s mayoralty primaries.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, meaning that I was sorry both that he had taken the time from his work for yet another ego trip and that he hadn’t had the time for me.

  “How’s the book moving?”

  “Seven thousand copies,” and here I doubled my fist, projected my thumb upward, then turned the fist over and shoved it toward the floor, Nero giving the word to plant the sword in the throat.

  Mailer laughed heartily. “That’s about four thousand more than most of them do.” By one, two, three of his courtiers he was being impressed with the urgency of the hour. “You going to the fight?” he said.

  “No.” We shook hands again, then he was gone, lost now, because of his pint-size, amidst his entourage.

  Although I never saw Mailer again, I began to see a lot of Quinn. I had found my way to Christopher Street and The Lion’s Head Ltd., a bar—as I have elsewhere noted— frequented by poets, novelists, columnists, reporters, editors, agents and camp followers, and though Quinn must be relegated to the latter category, and though I’d already witnessed him in what I deemed a woefully unbecoming role, I found on acquaintance I liked him very much and hence never mentioned the circumstances under which I’d first seen him. That summer Quinn spent a lot of time on the West Coast and in Italy, putting together one stock deal or another, but whenever he was in town he was at the bar of The Head, as it is familiarly known, and the half-dozen times I drank with him there I found him generous, outgoing and sincere, a sincerity that bordered on the touching when one day he told me that with any luck, with the closing of two or three deals then looming on the horizon, he could get out of the business entire
ly within a couple years and be free to do his own thing, an appeal to accept him as a man of more substance than a shuffler and reshuffler of embossed certificates.

  Had I then been sensitive to any appeals whatever, I certainly would have reacted to Quinn’s appeal, but I was on a two-bender-a-day program, the first beginning in the swanky borrowed apartment shortly after I awoke in the morning, the second in The Head after I’d taken a late afternoon-early evening snooze; and my discourse during the latter bender was about as stimulating as yup, nope and I’ll-be-fucked, none of which was destined to get enshrined among the provocative graffiti etched into the men’s room walls of The Head. I was in effect in a state of total and constant inebriation and thereby not only insulated utterly from every kind of subtle human appeal but even “the great events,” like Buzz and his Jack Armstrong buddies strolling among the craters of the moon, reached me with no more appeal than if those jokers had been exploring the marshlands of New Jersey.

  Even inebriated I found it impossible to tune out the harsh noises resounding from Chappaquiddick. If there was a name that inspired in some of The Head’s regulars more perked ears, more throbbing pulses, more stiffening of the backs than the name of Norman, it was the name of Kennedy. Not only had many of the patrons taken the assassinations of John and Robert as personal betrayals, it was as if they had seen shockingly and bloodily aborted some embryo that had promised them a greener, more lovely America than had heretofore been known; and now Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and the last of the Kennedys, had yanked the rug from under them completely, rendering the politically inclined patrons bitter, spiteful, bloodthirsty.

  On the night the Senator went on television to ex plain what happened following the “cookout” (ah, what PR genius came up with that one? Sorensen? Galbraith?), the bar was packed with no few of the men who set the temper, the moods and the opinions of the Republic. The Senator was minus the neck brace he had sported at Miss Kopechne’s funeral two days before—“Thank the decencies,” one reporter remarked—and the reaction at the bar drifted among deranged disbelief (one reporter bit his tongue, looked cross-eyed and did a little St. Vitus jig), uproarious laughter and strident hissing when the Senator —implying his house was as doomed as the house of Atreus—threw that “spitball” about the “curse” that haunts the Kennedy family. When it was over, Don Schlenker, the bearded, pageboyed bartender known affectionately as Prince Valiant, and one of my favorite people in all the world, volunteered a mot that perfectly expresses the awful division in this country. “I’ll bet my mommy cried.”

  And I had to laugh, sensing that mine probably had also.

  We drifted off into various groups, I finding my way to my favorite spot in the room, what I called “the paranoic’s alcove,” by the wall phone where I enjoyed leaning against the paneled walls beneath a framed glossy print of a dungareed Susan Sontag under which the novelist David Mark-son had written the legend “Is this really Joel Oppenheimer in drag?” With me were Markson, who if possible was even more apolitical than I, and Paul, a captain in the maritime service who wrote lovely poetry which on fear of rejection he never submitted. Never had I seen Paul so upset. A Jew, he loathed the Kennedys. It had to do with what he imagined was patriarch Joseph’s position on Hitler when in the pre-World War II months the elder Kennedy had been our ambassador to the Court of St. James. Paul was convinced that the tragedy of the Kennedys was the Biblical sins of the father, whom he called “a fascist prick,” being visited on the sons. To my shocked incredulity that such a gentle man could become so upset, all during the Senator’s telecast Paul, who had stood beside me, had kept repeating, “Look at that farina-faced glob of puke.”

  Trying to retemper an ugly mood unbecoming to men who had neither columns to write nor editorials to compose. I now told Paul and David a joke I’d heard from the New Left writer Jack Newfield, who was a qualified Kennedy man and was even then writing an excellent memoir sym pathetic to Robert Kennedy’s last days. It is an old joke now, but I’d heard it from Newfield the day after Chappaquiddick, so it probably is that a joke that swept the country was born at The Head. At the “cookout” Miss Kopechne tells Teddy she is pregnant. Teddy tells her not to worry about it, Miss Kopechne anxiously exclaims, “But what are we to do?” and Kennedy responds, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” After that the three of us exchanged a number of stories more appropriate to our easy cynicism, Paul dropped from out of his loftily indignant regions, and shortly thereafter I was at the bar for a refill when I felt a meaningful tapping on my shoulder and turned to find an angry Quinn.

  “Why don’t you guys knock that shit off?”

  I was surprised and bewildered. ‘“What shit?”

  “All those ugly jokes. Why don’t you give the guy a chance?”

  There was no doubt in my mind that Quinn was very upset, or that he wanted to knock me down, and that he would have little trouble doing so. Frankly, I was afraid, and felt that no matter what I said would be taken wrong and only further arouse his ire. So I didn’t say anything. I took my drink and retreated back to David and Paul.

  The odd thing was that though I had no doubt that this joke would often be told in a cheap, sleazy or disparaging way, that sort of demeaning shot had been the furthest thing from my mind, as I suspect it had from Newfield’s. For in my own drunken, aimless and sardonic way I was, and always had been, an unqualified Kennedy man. There was no doubt the Senator from Massachusetts had screwed up badly and had ended the near-incredulous tragedies of the Kennedy Decade in a shockingly shameful way, and if I chose to laugh at the black humor of this joke that seems so much more silly and inappropriate in retrospect than it then did, I’d chosen to laugh to allay the pain. I don’t know David and Paul’s motives for retreating with me to the paranoic’s alcove, but as much as for any other reason I’d gone there away from the bar because if a single newsman had started talking in the jargon of tomorrow’s columns and thrown at me a banner like “An End to Camelot,” I doubt if I’d have made it to the men’s room to do my puking.

  Moreover, from at least two reporters in that room I’d heard about the Kennedy brothers’ “notorious womanizing” (we did not hear such tales in Watertown, or on my island), stories told in a stout-fellow admiration that was apparently allowable among the “in-group” as long as it was not brought to the attention of the great unwashed out there yonder in that Outback west of the Hudson River. Even assuming that when he missed his turn and headed for that isolated beach sex had been the furthest thing from the Senator’s mind, which I am more than willing to assume —though any American male who claims the possibility did not cross his own mind is a shameless liar or a eunuch—I loathed that America which lived in cowering trepidation of a politician with a pair of balls and continued to see some elevated and enduring virtue in the wan celibacy suggested by an Eisenhower or a Nixon, but not nearly so much as I loathed the hypocrisy of that in-group America around me who could admiringly sanction a politician’s womanizing as long as he did not get caught.

  And moreover still, this pathetic bastard Kennedy had lost his oldest brother in World War II, had lost his only remaining brothers with their heads all but blown off before his eyes, and if any man was owed the right to an error it was he. Ironically, even then, even through my dark and constant inebriation. I was being more optimistic than most and thinking that this Kennedy might yet turn out to be the best of the brothers. Having spent more of my adulthood than it makes me easy to recall in and out of asylums, I could not at one time have lived had I not believed in second chances, and believed further that if a man could survive, heal himself and rise above what Styron has with such stunning eloquence called the “madness, illusion, error, dream and strife” of life, then he—yes, this Kennedy, Senator Edward M.—might yet come to know more of what goes into making a man than his brothers, taken in their primes, had ever known. Had I been capable of articulating anything other than yup, nope and I’ll-be-fucked, these a
re some of the things I might have said to Quinn. But I didn’t. In fear I retreated, and held my own counsel, warily watching Quinn out of the corner of my eye.

  In the company of my young nephews I often used to watch a seven p.m. Sunday television show geared to the kids and called Land of the Giants. I never knew what it was about, partly because I’d spent the afternoon drinking and watching the football games, partly because comprehension wasn’t of course in the least necessary. An Earth spaceship crewed by a bunch of guys who looked as if they might be the starting basketball team of a Kansas City junior college, along with a couple mini-skirted, cute-bummed cheerleader types, had force-landed on a planet inhabited by humanoids about three hundred times their size; and in every episode, to the great empathy of my nephews and millions of other “little people” around the Republic, the crew fled frantically in and out of ratholes in the baseboards, with ropes scaled office desks the size of Mt. Everest, and held at bay snarling, ferocious chipmunks as big as dinosaurs.

  In contrast to the majority of the crew, who looked for all the world as if they could hardly wait to get back to Kansas City, have a cheeseburger, a chocolate malt, and take one of those cute-bummed cheerleaders round the corner to the Bijou to see, well, perhaps Nixon’s favorite, Patton, there was another member of the crew, played with disgraceful, near-shameless hamminess by Kurt Kaznar, who was both my nephews’ and my favorite, and who was a compendium of the most reprehensible neuroses known to man, a cowering cringing slob who constantly betrayed his gleaming-toothed All-American buddies, who began a blubbering, excruciating whining faced with the most trifling impediment, a man who could make the biting into an apple a vision of such nightmarish gluttony as to make one want to deny his human heritage. How my nephews and I roared our laughing approval at Mr. Kaznar’s appearance in each segment, and how little my nephews— at their age sure they could never be like him!—realized that my own laughter was terribly compounded by the pain of recognition that I had somewhere along the line become so much like Mr. Kaznar.