A Fan's Notes

by Frederick Exley

  Frank Gifford went on to realize a fame in New York that only a visionary would have dared hope for: he became unavoidable, part of the city’s hard mentality. I would never envy or begrudge him that fame. I did, in fact, become perhaps his most enthusiastic fan. No doubt he came to represent to me the realization of life’s large promises. But that is another part of this story. It was Owen who over the years kept bringing me back to life’s hard fact of famelessness. It was for this reason, as much as any other, that I had wanted to make the trip to Oneida to make my remembrances. After that day at the Polo Grounds I heard of Owen from time to time, that he was a line coach for one NFL team or another, that he was coaching somewhere in Canada—perhaps at Winnipeg or Saskatchewan. Wherever, it must have seemed to him the sunless, the glacial side of the moon. Owen unquestionably came to see the irony of his fate. His offensively obsessed detractors had been rendered petulant by his attitude that “football is a game played down in the dirt, and always will be,” and within three years after his leaving, his successors, having inherited his ideas (the umbrella pass-defense for one), took the Giants to a world championship with little other than a defense. It was one of the greatest defenses (Robustelli, Patton, Huff, Svare, Livingston, et al.) that the game has ever seen, but, for all of that, a championship won by men who played the game where Owen had tenaciously and fatally maintained it was played—in the dirt.

  After that day at the Polo Grounds, I went the way I must go, a little sluggardly, smiling a smile that mocked myself. If I went wrong, it was because, like Tonio Kroger, there was for me no right way. I lived in many cities—Chicago, Los Angeles, Colorado Springs, Baltimore, Miami—and with each new milieu my jobs grew less remunerative, my dreams more absurdly colored. To sustain them I found that it took increasing and ever-increasing amounts of alcohol. After a time I perceived that I was continually contemplating the world through the bubbling, cerise hue of a wine glass. Awaking one morning in a jail cell in Miami, I was led before a judge on a charge of public intoxication and vagrancy, given a suspended sentence of thirty days on the county farm, told by the judge I was a fatuous lunatic, and ordered to be out of the city of Miami within the hour. I came home then, back to Watertown, and by the autumn of 1958, a brief five years from the autumn I had stood in the Polo Grounds, I was in the Avalon Valley State Hospital for the mentally insane and not particularly interested in the reasons that had brought me there.

  3/ Straw Hat for a Madman

  The Reception Building of the Avalon Valley State Hospital for the mentally insane lies high up on the eastern slope of the valley. A new patient is placed for orientation on its topmost or third floor. By bringing his face up close to the window—so that the bars begin to blur, then closer till those imposing reminders of lost freedom disappear altogether from view—he can look down the hill and see the entire hospital spread out below him. From that point—though for a time one is conscious of the cold, somber, and unyielding bars on one’s cheeks—the place looks not unlike an Eastern university where anxious parents send their apple-cheeked sons and daughters to discover man’s heritage.

  In the fall—although I was there twice, in all seasons, it is in the autumn that I best remember it, for it was in that fanciful season that first I saw the place—a mist hung silently in the valley. The trees were all shot then with wine-reds, brilliant golds, and breath-taking lemons; even the sidewalks, bordered by the neat-trimmed lawns that swept down from the three-story, red-brick buildings, and crowded with easy-promenading patients, seemed, from that comforting distance, to be conveying chattering, eager students to their “Psych 202” class.

  My first few days at Avalon Valley were spent standing at that window, caressing the illusion that I was in the sheltered bosom of a university. There came reminders to the contrary. Once I noticed a man, looking little more than buglike from where I stood, walking with the stiff, stick-legged trot of the cretin; another time a man bent with the ravages of age. Again, from behind me once came the long, plaintive wail of suffering, and I turned to see a man with whom I had struck an acquaintance, and whom I had till then judged quite sane, curled up, fetus-like, in the corner of the barren ward, sound asleep and dreaming some vision of his private hell, emitting the language of the tortured heart. On one particularly stunning day, when the sky was summer-blue and the autumn colors were defined with the richness of some dream of season, and I had finally succeeded in giving myself up totally to the illusion that I was some other place than I was, I felt an anxious nudging at my elbow and turned to find a short, hideously wasted, blue-black Negro. Speaking between brackish, putrescent teeth which emitted a dizzying, nearly eye-watering, odor, he told me there was a man within him, pestering him, allowing him no peace; then, in a very precise and startling way, he tapped with his forefinger at his diaphragm, indicating the exact location of the man, and asked me to listen—to hear for myself! With great solemnity, I bent down, placed my ear to his chest, and listened, hearing nothing, though I really was prepared to hear.

  Lifting my head, I said, “What do he say?” adopting his manner of speech in the hope he would feel comfortable with me.

  “He say he the debbil, an’ he gwoan kill me.”

  There was terror in the poor man’s eyes.

  “Dey gottah cut ‘im out,” he said, meaning the doctors would literally have to take their scalpels, make their incisions, and reach in and remove the man. The Negro’s anguish was so reasonably modulated that I pictured the whole thing, saw the rubber-gloved hand go in between the spread flesh, feel tentatively around, and suddenly grab the little bugger by his slimy neck. It was here I lost the picture. I wondered if the little man would be blue-black, too, though it suddenly occurred to me—and I had smiled then—that he would be white as alabaster. Detecting my smile, and misinterpreting it, the Negro repeated, “Dey got to. Dey got to.”

  “Dey will,” I said. “Dey will.”

  Because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I then put my arm about his shoulder, and together this hideous, unredeemable black paranoiac and I stood at the window for a long time, our eyes in the direction of the stunning autumn valley, though I was conscious now not of any scenery but only of the spasmodic, terrifying pulsations of his furious heart. It was this interruption that forced me finally to accept the knowledge that I was at no university; more importantly, that those apple-cheeked sons and daughters don’t really learn much of man’s heritage at a university.

  In the Reception Building we were moved, according to our condition, or alphabetically, or at the doctor’s whim—I never determined which—from the third to the second to the first floors. We were moved until the day came when, our names having been rather too dramatically called from a list by a fatuously inflated attendant, we descended the stairs into a long, concrete room in the basement. There we signed a receipt for what few clothes—all tagged now with white cloths bearing our names—we were permitted to have, gathered the clothes up into our arms, and climbed back up the stairs to await the trucks that would bear us to the main part of the hospital—down the hill. As we waited, the doctors, the nurses, the attendants, all approached us with sanguine gaiety. “Isn’t it grand?” they seemed to be asking. Indeed, this was to have been a grand day. We had been told ever so many times that it would be a lovely day—a kind of moving-up day; when this day arrived, it was the sign our cases had been diagnosed. We had now only to go down the hill to be cured, and in a matter of weeks be back in the bosoms of our loved ones. Waiting and sitting in silence, wolfing cigarettes and basking in cheerful smiles, we knew better. Our faces showed it. We were not glad.

  The Reception Building had been crowded with patients who had been at Avalon Valley before, who had gone down the hill and back to those bosoms to find them as cold, obdurate, and insensible as granite; having come back now bitter and defeated, they told us terrifying stories of the indignities that would be heaped upon us down there. They told us stories covering everything from the hideousness of
the food to the gross inhumanity of the attendants, and they warned us to avoid, as long as possible, that trip downward. (Most of these stories turned out to be untrue; later I was to wonder why the hospital hadn’t segregated these repeaters from us new patients, though I eventually came to see that it had been for the best: if one is led to expect the worst, nothing can really touch him.) I was not in the least worried. I had been in a hospital before—a private one, to be sure —and had come to understand that there was in the treatment of patients (I had come to call them inmates) certain overtones of punishment, some subtle, some not so subtle. We had failed our families by our inability to function properly in society (as good a definition of insanity as any); our families, tears compounded by self-pity in their eyes, had pleaded with the doctors to give us the goals that would set our legs in motion again. The goals—a wife and family, a vice-presidency, a Cadillac—varied only with the imperceptibility, the bland vision of the relative.

  Moreover, I had also come to understand that most doctors —at least those with whom I had come in contact—were a not particularly competent lot, thoroughly accepting the notions of normality that society had imposed upon them. For the most part they did not consider it their duty to probe the strange, anguished, and perverse realities we had fabricated for ourselves. No doubt to a great extent motivated by lack of time and an unconscious awareness of their own shortcomings, they found it simpler to eliminate our realities and substitute those of society. It had seemed to me, too, that these doctors were quite willing—perhaps unconsciously eager—to punish patients for refusing these realities. About their treatment there was a kind of melancholy brutality; hadn’t we, after all, long since put aside society’s realities as being incompatible with our abilities to live? On discovering this “truth” about doctors some months before, I had evolved what I had come to call Exley’s Law of Institutional Survival. It was simple. It involved leaving the mind as malleable as mush and letting them impose any inanities upon it they wished. It had worked for me once. I was sure it would again.

  That is why, waiting for the truck to go down the hill, I had no fear at all. I did, in fact, even look forward to the trip with morbid though detached relish, wondering if I weren’t about to witness some new essence of man’s stupidity or viciousness or cruelty to his fellow man. From the moment these repeaters had started talking, I found I wasn’t so much interested in their “horror” stories as in the tellers, some of whom were back at Avalon Valley for the fifth, sixth, seventh time—well on their way to the permanent and endless listlessness of incarceration. These people fascinated me.

  There was in their tone as they told their tales more than the pleasure of upsetting us; there was a very real hope that we wouldn’t survive the outrages they described. Talk of these outrages brought our eyebrows into scowls, twisted our mouths in pain, rendered us hideous. It was on noticing this transfiguration that I began to understand. For some time I had detected that if these repeaters had anything in common, it was sheer and naked ugliness—often so marked that it required an enormous effort of will to look directly at them when they were talking. These repeaters were the ugly, the broken, the carrion. They had crossed eyes and bug eyes and cavernous eyes. They had club feet or twisted limbs or—sometimes—no limbs. These people were grotesques. On noticing this, I thought I understood: there was in mid-century America no place for them. America was drunk on physical comeliness. America was on a diet. America did its exercises. America, indeed, brought a spirituality to its dedication to pink-cheeked, straight-legged, clear-eyed, health-exuding attractiveness—a fierce, strident dedication. It was the dedicated spirituality of the dancer to the ballet, except that the dancer might come to that experience we call Art. To what, I asked myself, was America coming? To no more, it seemed to me, than the carmine-hued, ever-sober “young-marrieds” in the Schlitz beer sign. The sin of these repeaters was that they obtruded frightfully in the billboard sign, rather like fortuitously projecting Quasimodo into an advertisement to delineate the Male Ideal (I saw Julie London, her sensual lips blowing the lazy smoke of Marlboros into the sexually smug and outrageously winking visage of Charles Laughton’s “Quasi”). I was aware of oversimplifying. One didn’t know whether these people had been rendered grotesque by their perverseness or whether their grotesqueness had rendered them perverse. Still, I saw the comfort America could purchase itself by getting rid of them. Meeting payment in kind, they delighted in rendering us hideous. If we did not have common humanity on America’s level—the level of the advertising commercial—then they would bring to our countenances the ugliness of despair, and at that unhappy level we would come together and make our marriage. “Oh, God,” I thought, “they want nothing more than to be at one with us.”

  So I sat and waited, without fear, guided only by a vow

  78 · A Fan’s Notes

  I had made occasioned by an incident which had taken place the day before. For a number of days I had been putting my head down to the Negro’s chest and listening for the devil within him; the other patients, whom he never tired of asking to listen, were apparently too embarrassed to do so. As a result we had become involved. He believed me the only one who accepted his reality. I was standing at the window when I suddenly heard a shrill, indignant, near-hysterical shouting and turned to see an attendant, his body tensed as if with pain, his face livid with rage. He was screaming at the Negro, whose body, in turn, seemed to be bending backward in the onrush of the man’s anger. I don’t remember the attendant’s precise words, but they were enunciated with that chilling clarity that anger sometimes induces and were to the effect that the Negro had no man inside him, that there wasn’t going to be any goddam operation, and that if he persisted in pestering people, the attendant would goddam well see to it that the Negro got an operation he wouldn’t forget. There was saliva on the attendant’s chin. The Negro began to weep. He wept quite openly, wept as the child he was. I turned away, back to the window. My hands went to the bars, my fingers found a grip on them, and I squeezed and squeezed and squeezed—watching my knuckles go white as hoarfrost and listening to the thunder in my head.

  I wanted to kill that attendant, kill him in the same way that I wanted to destroy that America in pursuit of its own loveliness, kill him and it for their utter and unending lack of imagination. Of course the Negro had the devil inside him. Wasn’t he the ugliest America of all—the black America? His devil was, like those others, his alienation from his countrymen, and that alienation and that devil were gwoan kill him sure, were even now engulfing him in fires more horrible than any of which Beelzebub ever dreamed—the fires of rejection. They might make the devil’s voice less audible, they might cool the flames, but to tell him there was no devil was not only lack of imagination, it was a lie. Watching my hands on the bars, a little looser now, the knuckles going from snow-white to crimson, I made a vow. I vowed that never again at Avalon Valley would I get involved with a patient. I knew how to beat the bastards; I had beat them before; and the way was simple—one didn’t tell them about one’s devils. One didn’t give their unimaginative mentalities an opportunity to hear about one’s little man. My hands still on the bars and utter murder in my heart, I knew that if I got involved again I was only exposing myself to the risk of suffering another’s defeat—a defeat that seemed to me as inevitable as did my victory. As it turned out, that vow was to make my voyage through Avalon Valley swift and painless, or nearly painless, and what pain there would be wouldn’t come until the very end. It wouldn’t come until I was all but ready to leave the hospital and go back into the America I knew. And though it is indeed best to keep one’s devils within, one still has to learn to live with them; and this, when it came time to leave Avalon Valley, I yet hadn’t learned to do.

  My own devils—those which, prior to my commitment to Avalon Valley, had already sent me to a private hospital the preceding spring—were not particularly disturbing, at least not to me, and at least not at that time. During one of my three
stays in funny farms, I once saw written on one of my records either “paranoiac-schizophrenic” or “schizophrenic-paranoiac” (I was obviously one type with overtones of the other ) , and the term had struck me so impressively that I had made a mental note of it, promising myself to reread Freud, with whom I had made only a desultory and uninspired effort at college. I never bothered to reread him. Before getting to him, I read the pre-Freudians, Hawthorne and Dostoevski, and because they seemed to me to grasp the human psyche better than all the post-Freudian writers lumped into one glibly analytical and monstrous bulk, I decided I had best remember the details of my particular illness truly and precisely: I was certain that understanding was contained in the very detail.

  But I did not know this then; and without having read Herr Doktor closely, surmising only from what I could remember of him, I supposed that I was more typically paranoiac: I was much given to fantasy. I was never incapacitated by fantasy. America had gone wrong for me, or me for America; I had held up my hand, said, “Whoah there: this has gone far enough!” and had gone home to Mummy, where I lay on the davenport for many months. I had incapacitated myself; the fantasy had followed to consume the endlessly idle hours. There was nothing grossly unusual in the fantasy: it was a projected compendium of all that was most truly vulgar in America: I was rich, famous, and powerful, so incredibly handsome that within moments of my entrance stunning women went spread-eagle before me. But I never for a second “lived” this fantasy. There was always one I, aloof and ironical, watching the other me play out “his” tawdry dream. We were like illicit and Puritan lovers who had given birth to a monstrous fantasy child; as happens in all unions coupled in guilt, we as lovers would come to loathe both each other and the monster child. By the time we did so, I had been on the davenport much too long, my mother’s eyes had gone from sympathy to the myopic squint of pain; and when she suggested I enter an expensive private hospital downstate, I quite readily acceded.