A Fan's Notes

by Frederick Exley

  Even apart from the “loathsomeness of the lovers,” or my mother’s pain, I needed little persuasion. Learning that the hospital was going to cost two hundred dollars a week, I naturally assumed something would be done for me (if, indeed, there was anything to be done). I wasn’t then so un-American as not to believe that enough money can do anything, restore the soul or whatever. Moreover, my particular fantasy had paled to the extent that even thinking of exploring some new facet of it—the seduction of a half-dozen of those downy blondes simultaneously—tired me to the point of heavy and massive weariness, and I wanted to explore this fantasy with a doctor in the hope that once uttered (like a curse against God that drifts into the wind) it would be gone forever. I wanted to lie hour after hour on a couch, pouring out the dark, secret places of my heart—do this feeling that over my shoulder sat humanity and wisdom and generosity, a munificent heart—do this until that incredibly lovely day when the great man would say to me, his voice grave and dramatic with discovery: “This is you, Exley. Rise and go back into the world a whole man.”

  That hospital (the word is frightfully harsh) was lovely. Its buildings—château-like houses—commanded a high, green hill, and its shrubbed, carpet-like lawns ran sweepingly down between ancient, verdant trees. It was spring then, the spring just preceding my autumn commitment to Avalon Valley; and the azure sky seemed always mottled with sailing, billowing clouds, which, when we turned our eyes heavenward, seemed to caress and cool our faces. Beneath us in the valley, deep blue and turgid and heart-stopping, was the Hudson River. A tennis court lay down the hill to our right, a swimming pool to our left. We dined—all save one of us who, past caring, ate with greasy fingers and was therefore consigned to another room, thoughtfully isolated from our genteel views—on white linen, murmuring pleasantries and avoiding all mention of the particular perversities which had brought us there. We were creatures of phrases—”Indeed!” and “On my word!” and “Is it possible!” and “Pray tell me!” Nothing rude or native ever issued from our mouths, and after a time the effect seemed so consummately artificial that I began to wonder if we had enough substance to cast shadows. Our doctors were hoary-maned and sharp-featured. They exuded tweed and pipe tobacco and managed their Camel cigarettes with a most ethereal delicacy, displaying their aristocratic hands. They left us giddy, nearly dizzy, with admiration at the way they somberly enunciated the jargon of the psychiatrist. Indeed, indeed! Everything seemed so perfect that even now it rather surprises me to confess that these doctors proved to be as insubstantial as the patients, not only incapable of understanding but unwilling to listen to the language of the heart.

  After the most cursory of examinations, it was determined that I undergo insulin-shock treatment; and, though I must have experienced qualms at the rapidity of this determination, I soon dismissed them, replacing them with the utter and adoring devotion for the doctors and the attendants that the treatment instilled. Each morning I rolled over in bed, turned the cheeks of my ass to the ceiling, and received my injection. While the insulin began to burn the sugar—the very life—from my body, I quite cheerfully lay back to await the disappearance of debilitating dreams, ancient insults, past hurts inflicted—the disappearance, as though they had never existed, of all the things that ravage the soul and age the body, that turn the eyes inward and settle a melancholy on the countenance.

  Is it any wonder I expected so much? At first one experienced a kind of bizarre giddiness, one felt slightly drunk. This was followed by heavy perspiration, then something like fever. Now came a feverish chatter, where one lay talking out his soul to the ceiling—at times even going into I-a hallucinatory state, a state in which I was once virtually ·45 certain that I was in Limbo waiting to be judged by a personal and very vindictive God. Finally, at that moment just prior .4.1 to shock, one learned what hunger was—terrible, excruciating hunger. On the California desert I have walked all the forenoon on Route 66 and have had to beg water—I got a half-cup—from two vagabonds who had long since denied their alliance with their fellows; after three days without food in Miami, I have gone among the wide-beamed, large-breasted tourists, my palm face upward, and begged for money. But

  these were trifling and contemptible exercises in degradation - compared to the majestic loss of dignity rendered in one by insulin.

  I screamed. I babbled. I swooned for food. “Oh, don’t do this to me!” I shouted; for, lying alone in my room, I was never certain that by some crazy happenstance I had not been forgotten. But they always came, bringing with them not a rich, sugary orange juice but an elixir—the very stuff of life; and I drank it as though, having been taken to the very pit of death, the indifferent universe had suddenly and inexplicably assumed a beneficence and decided to grant me life; drank it with such voraciousness that the heavy syrup cascaded over my chin and came to settle in sticky, thick pools at my throat. I drank it wanting to kiss the hands and feet of the attendant, my savior.

  After a number of days, as the amounts of insulin were increased, I drifted quite mercifully into shock where I lay in a dreamless death in which I was supposed to rid myself of my devils, leaving them, when I rose to life again, back there in the deep and heavy darkness. At the appointed hour, the doctor gave me an injection of glucose, I rose from that death into life, and was given another glass of the elixir. Moments later the insulin patients, still in their pajamas, were seated at breakfast. We piled our cornflakes high with sugar. Shoving great spoonfuls into our mouths, we remarked to each other the pleasantness of the weather, the beauty of - the hospital, and how much better we were feeling. We all agreed that insulin shock was a wonderful treatment. We could not believe otherwise. We were all making penance for the grief we had caused others; and we had to believe that a treatment in which one fawned and begged, drooled and prayed, a treatment which cost so much in loss of pride and manhood, in humiliating dependency, would have to bear miraculous results. We had to believe that in the end we would be purified.

  Had my consultations with the doctor proved so fruitful, I might have gone back into the world trim and wide-eyed and upright, and all my days caressed the illusion that Life was Ennobling, that God was Beneficent, that the Universe was a Joyous and Profoundly Simple Thing. For a very long time that doctor, working with hardly more than his tweed jacket, his Camel cigarettes, his hoary mane, his chiseled features, and his clear blue eyes, had me convinced that these things were so. To my surprise we sat facing each other, while through the heavy smoke of our cigarettes I talked. I began tentatively, skirting all over and about the real reasons why I believed my life’s labor had earned me this: a mental hospital at twenty-seven. I told him of my gold mine in Eldorado, of my vineyards in the south of France, of my merchant ships moored at Cadiz; I told him of my seductions of lazy-legged Jewesses in Tel Aviv, of incredibly aseptic blondes in Copenhagen, of golden, burnished mulattoes at Port Said. Each time I looked up at him to see how I was doing, I saw (and I was glad) that his mouth, a fine, distinguished, knifelike mouth, was twisted into a benevolent, tolerant smile.

  That smile gave me the courage to go on. I had, as I say, exhausted my fantasy before even entering the hospital; and because fantasies seemed to me to rise out of some deep inability to live with myself, I thought it best to reveal to the kindly man my self-loathing. I revealed to him my sense of my own putrefaction—my dreams of rape and murder and incest, talked and talked and talked, while on the other side of the smoke he sat like some great god. But as I talked in this new way, something began to go wrong; the smiles became less frequent, more galvanic, until there were no smiles at all, and, to my bewilderment, I began to notice that whenever I spoke of certain things, his countenance went from one of restrained tolerance to one of sobriety—nay, more than that, to one of downright somberness—he might, I thought once or twice, be one of Hawthorne’s elders sitting in judgment of Hester Prynne. As the days wore on, this somberness verging on judgment distressed me so much that I began to demand from him some comments on my
revelations. His response was extremely disconcerting. Invariably, and to my extreme bewilderment, he met my demands by talking lengthily and unintelligibly—to me at least—about the way insulin works on the human cell, and what the best psychiatric thinking believes—for they don’t really know—insulin shock does for one. My first impression was that he was exercising the prerogatives of the analyst and withholding his cogent discoveries about me till his assessment of my character was complete. But he continued to ramble on with this irrelevant monologue until I could stand it no longer. Embarked upon it one day, he was going along very glibly when, suddenly and rudely, I interrupted him. “You want to be irrelevant?” I snapped. “I’ll be irrelevant, too!” Then I proceeded to tell him something from my past that I had told to no one before him, nor will ever tell again. My eyes avoiding his, I spoke in the fitful, hesitant monosyllables of grief. When, finally finished and exhausted with relief (as one is with the ultimate confession), I looked up to make sure that he had understood me utterly, the room drifted away beneath me, the dizzying blood rushed to my head, something in me snapped: I broke. On his face was written the unmistakable legend of distaste.

  I started to giggle. For the next two weeks I did little other than giggle. I was certainly as mad then as I had ever been. My first thought was to get away. A few days later I left the grounds, intent on I know not what—going to a movie or California, or simply intent on registering a protest. I was almost immediately picked up—as I no doubt intended to be —and the next day, without warning, I was ordered onto a bed to receive my first electroshock treatment. Pleading with the doctor, one of the younger staff members, that this was an unnecessary, even a vindictive, measure did no good. So I tried saber-rattling, telling him that if he wanted those electrodes on my skull, he’d damn well have to put them there. “We can do that, too,” he said. Now I turned to the attendants who were standing by to prevent my injuring myself in the convulsions that succeed the electrical charge. They would not look at me. They looked instead at the floor, as though rather ashamed at what they were helpless to prevent. Now I asked the doctor if I mightn’t have the treatment explained to me, saying that it was only natural to fear the unfamiliar. When he shook his head no, my first impulse was to flee, to scamper as fast and as far as my legs would carry me. Looking from the doctor to the attendants, neither of whom would now return my glance, I suddenly became unbearably thirsty, which was followed immediately by an abrupt, tortured breathing. I don’t know how long I stood there, breathing in this terrified way; but at some moment—a moment wonderful in its protectiveness—the listlessness of defeat engulfed me, and I walked, trancelike, to the bed and lay down.

  The wide rubber band containing the electrodes was wrapped tightly about my skull, just above the ears; the doctor checked my pulse, told me he was going to give me an injection to relax me (most of the uncomfortable effects of electroshock are back injuries caused by the patient’s inordinate tension). I wanted to say something in a very manly though pleasant way—”Whatever you say, Doc”—something to get the man back on my side. I did not know then that these goodly men did not know any more about electroshock than about insulin therapy, and I thought it might be prudent to remind him, despite his apparent hostility, of my humanity in the hope that he would not approach his work too stridently. But my fear was so great that I despaired of saying more than a word, okay; even this came out to the tempo of my palpitating heart, ‘kay!—came with a rushing, girlish feebleness. Then I felt the needle go into my arm, my eyelids came over my eyeballs like a deep blue velvet curtain over my mismanaged life, I sensed a quick movement behind me, all was darkness.

  Many times after that I lay down for electroshock. Never once did the despair and the fear of the initial treatment diminish, the fear of having one’s consciousness so irrevocably laid on the indifferent altar of science. My insulin shock was continued mornings, and I believed that I was getting these new treatments twice a week, in the afternoons. Rising out of the deep slumber of the insulin one morning, and beginning to experience that incredible hunger, I was suddenly aware of that tight rubber band about my skull, conscious that they were giving me both treatments simultaneously. At first I was astonished, then terrified, then angry. About to bellow my protest, I sensed that quick movement behind me, all again was darkness. Because of the temporary loss of memory induced by electroshock, I did not, until some time in the afternoon, piece together this knowledge. I lived that day in an agony of apprehension, conscious throughout it that something disturbing was lurking beneath the conscious level of my mind. When I finally did remember, feeling again that inordinate hunger and that strap about my skull, I was once again surprised, again frightened, finally furious.

  Subsequent to the consultation that had ended in my perpetual and uncontrollable giggling, my doctor had discontinued our sessions together; and it suddenly occurred to me that where he—or I—had failed, he was determined that science would succeed. This possibility opened before me fantastic vistas; I could not help wondering how far the man was prepared to go. I had seen my fellow patients reduced to infantilism by a gymnastic treatment called regressive shock, an intermittent series of electrical whacks on the head that go on night and day for ten days. I had seen the results of that ultimately humane treatment, the frontal lobotomy. For this, they remove a chunk of skull in the forehead area, stick an instrument not unlike an ice pick down to the brain where, with a few curt brushes, they scrape away all grief, all rage, all violence, all the things that make us Man, leaving one great hulk of loonily smiling protoplasm. Although I knew that either of these treatments would be out of the question in my case, I had this fear. In a way I suppose I was prepared to believe them guilty of anything.

  For days I lived in a cocoon of rage, wanting to strike out, to run, not knowing what to do. For a time I thought of telephoning attorneys and writing passionate, eloquent letters to the Governor and the New York Post, letters which would arouse a slumbering world and bring it, indignant and righteous with wrath, descending upon the grounds to free my fellow patients and me. Had I not taken a long, hard look at my fellow patients, I might have done these things, too. “On my word” and “Don’t tell me,” they were still blabbering away at each other, quite unaware of poor Exley’s indignation. I had to laugh. “My God,” I thought, “they are insane—and always will be, whether they leave the grounds or not.” I laughed and laughed and laughed. This discovery led me to the obvious question: how about me? Was I, too, insane? It was a difficult admission to make, but I am glad that I made it; later I came to believe that this admission about oneself may be the only redemption in America. Yes, I was insane. Still, I did not despise my oddness, my deviations, those things which made me, after all, me. I wanted to preserve those things. To do it, I had to get out of that place. Then—as quickly as the rage had come over me—I suddenly knew how to do it. I would be the kind of man I suspected the world wanted me to be. I played the game with all the loathing the benevolent doctor had put at my command.

  I whistled. My gait took on a cheerful, nearly joyous bounce. Each Wednesday evening I went to the dances in the Recreation Room and there waltzed wacky old maids round and round the room. I was of good cheer, exclaiming to all and any who inquired after my health, “Great! How’s yourself? Wonderful! Couldn’t be better!” I spent my mornings in the Arts and Crafts Room making a briefcase. With it, I never tired of proclaiming, I intended to re-enter the great and wonderful world. That briefcase became symbolic, the conspicuous admission on my part of the efficacy of the doctor’s decision to give me electroshock. It was made of grained, extremely expensive black leather. With the intense and cheery disposition of a saint, I wove it together at the seams, whistling. For its interior I fitted it with celluloid containers. In these I put samples of the deathless prose I had written for various corporations (when I had worked, I had worked in public relations) and a sheaf of handsomely printed résumés from which I excluded certain information, such as that
they had been printed up at a mental institution. For the case’s crowning touch, I had it fitted with a gold-plated zipper and had mounted on its grained surface a gold-plated name-and-address plate. Completed, it was a wonderful creation. It was so wonderful that as work had progressed upon it the doctor put at my disposal a younger head shrinker, one with whom I whiled away the lethargic afternoons, feeding him incredible stories of my ideas of future bliss.

  “Look here,” I said, with stunning self-assurance, “I’m a relatively intelligent young man,” and smiled modestly to await his nodding agreement. “I can, when I’m up to it, put on a rather striking appearance. There’s no reason whatever I shouldn’t go right down to Madison Avenue, make boodles of money, and start raising a family. Yes,” I added gravely, as though the latter had struck me as an unusually vivid idea, “I think I’d like a family!”