A Fan's Notes

by Frederick Exley

  The men were furious. “Did he let you do that?” they screamed at me.

  “No, for Christ’s sake!” I bellowed back at them.

  Whether they believed me or not, they let it go, sank into sullenness, and Paddy’s ass had been saved once again.

  Only once did I have anything resembling a conversation with Paddy the Duke, and this did not take place until some weeks later, on the night before he left the hospital, though at the time I talked with him I didn’t know he was leaving the next day. For a number of weeks I lost all interest in Paddy and even succeeded in almost totally obliterating my milieu. My weeks became a long slumber below which I was always conscious that when I awoke it would be to the discomfiting thought of my imminent departure from the hospital. Dr. K. had decided that my illness did not warrant confinement (he expressed distinct alarm, then quickly covered himself to protect his medical brethren, on learning that I had been given shock treatment). It was true that I had violated many of the customs and prejudices of society; but his solution, though I knew it to be precisely to the point, was not so easy to execute: he told me to stop thinking of myself so much, that my disease was the “bosom serpent,” egotism. “You’ll be going soon,” he said to me one day. Because I expressed neither joy nor alarm, he did not mention it again for a number of weeks.

  During these weeks the only time I was conscious of Paddy was at the Wednesday evening meetings of the Avalon Valley Chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, to which all patients whose trouble was compounded by booze, or whose trouble had become booze (there is a difference), were required to go. I always took a table with two skeptics; we called it “Cynics’ Circle.” Snow White was, of course, one of the men. He wasn’t an alcoholic; his problem was that he was tired, and he came to these meetings for laughs. The other man was Bronislaw. He was about forty-five. He had blue eyes, a wonderfully virile face with very pronounced features, a fine crop of thick, graying hair, and he chain-smoked perfectly formed cigarettes that he rolled himself. By his own admission (and without our even inquiring) he was Very Big in Greenwich Village. A number of short stories, he said, had been written about him; and he had also cluttered a good bit of the canvas of a novel called, I think, Flee the Angry Strangers. I never understood why. Though I liked him immensely, I never understood a word he said and could not comprehend how anybody could have got him on paper. His reminiscences were completely devoid of transitional thoughts, his sentences dealt only in symbolic essences, hurdling erratically from one to the next. He was as unintelligible to me as Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. He was not an alcoholic either. He had been both a dope addict (cured in Lexington) and a dope pusher, and he loved people more than any man I had ever met. To him everybody was a “bunny” that he just wanted to “love to death.” He came to the meetings for free coffee and doughnuts, and because he was trying to “love Snow White to death,” though Snow White always maintained that it was I he was after.

  The three of us had a pact, governed by signals—pinching one another, agreeing to step fiercely on each other’s toes when we felt riotous laughter welling up within us. It was not that any of us doubted the efficacy of group therapy for alcoholics (it is probably the only treatment), but, oh, dear heart, alcoholics in the loony bin! Their “falls” had been - from dizzying, nearly invisible heights. “And so I said to Churchill, ‘Winston,’ I said—” “My daddy lose twenty-six mil- , lion in The Crash, so I never get a etchookashun—” Paddy had his own table even at these meetings. He had by then drawn his isolation about him like a mantle, and nobody, but nobody, violated it. He had a wooden clipboard, thick with lined paper, on which he furiously took down apparently every word of every confession. This used to infuriate Snow White; he sensed this note-taking was rendering the confessors shy, that they weren’t opening up the way they ordinarily would, and that he was being deprived of some of his laughless laughs. “What the fuck’s he doin’ with that pencil?” he would ask petulantly, hate in his eyes. “He’s a bunny, ain’t he?” Bronislaw would say. “Ignore duh fucking guy!” Snow White would snap, as though we had brought him up. But I couldn’t really ignore him, and often I found my eyes drifting to his table to watch him write right off the page, then crazily flap it over, like a timid stenographer working for a brutish, tyrannical employer. There was a definite fear of not getting it all down. Once or twice he met my gaze, and when he did so, I smiled at him, condescendingly. His blunt Irish features hardened fiercely, his black eyes protruded, but this nonsense no longer worked with me. Once I laughed aloud at him and with the fingernail of my thumb scraped against my upper teeth. Later I heard that it was the Mafiosa sign signaling to the recipient that vengeance was imminent. At the time I only meant to say, “You’re a goofy fuck—you know that?”

  November came in cold and went; and as it went I began to grow more perceptibly uneasy; I knew—or suspected—that I would be released any day, and in truth, though I daren’t say so to the authorities for fear of never getting out, there was in all the world no place whatever I cared to go. I spent a lot of time brooding on this phenomenon, which Paddy the Duke must have sensed. Where I had not been conscious of him for weeks except at the AA meetings, I seemed now always to be looking up out of my apprehension of the future to find him looking at me, his black eyes studying me intently, as if he understood it all implicitly and in a way that not even I did.

  Sitting in the ward one night, staring at the floor, and caught up, as I say, in what had become for me a perpetual anguish of the future, I suddenly became conscious of him sitting right next to me, staring at me. In a way I was surprised: it was Paddy’s custom, as I have said, immediately after supper to go lie on his bed and study the ceiling. Knowing this habit, I now had no doubt he intended to speak to me and the longer he held his peace, the more uneasy I became. I was on the verge of moving when he spoke.

  “You’ll be leavin’ soon, huh?”

  “Maybe so,” I said indifferently. I meant to suggest that I didn’t care a bit whether the conversation continued or not.

  “You won’t make it.” Though he did not say this arrogantly, there was in his voice an alarming finality.

  “That’s hardly for you to determine,” I snapped.

  “Oh, you won’t,” he persisted. “Take my word for it. I’ve watched you and your big-shot buddies up at the meetings. You’re even worse than they are. You think you’re better’n everybody. You think your duty is to fox everybody, instead of what it should be: to find out what you’re doin’ here. It’s only the last couple of days you thought about that,” he assured me. “Ain’t that right?”

  It was, but I couldn’t grant it to him (perhaps I didn’t understand it then). Desiring to humiliate him in some way, to jeer at him, I said, “And you? I suppose you will make it!”

  “Yes, I will,” he said. Then he smiled that pain-in-the-ass smile. “You know why?”

  “God knows! Tell me why!” I almost shrieked.

  At this point he did a ludicrously dramatic, profoundly unsettling thing. Looking slowly over his right shoulder, then over his left—and in either case there was nothing there but blank wall—he brought his head down close to mine and whispered, in the most chillingly solemn tones, and almost choking on the words:

  “I’ve discovered what alcoholism is.”

  My first desire was to shriek with laughter, to dismiss him as a madman. But I found that I couldn’t. There was something in his demeanor so totally forbidding that such laughter would have seemed sacrilegious. I considered getting rid of him in a friendly way, of saying with an air of facetiousness, “If you’ve done that, pal, you’ve succeeded where a thousand—no, a thousand times a thousand quacks have failed!” But I could not even say that, could not say anything finally. I knew, suddenly, that I wanted to hear his solution, to hear what alcoholism was. All Paddy’s stay in Avalon Valley had been characterized by that apartness, that singleness of purpose that might indeed reveal him as a man somehow more gifted than other men, a man who might
come to truths not given to other men. Paddy knew then, by my silence, that I wanted to hear. Typically, he made me wait—wait for what seemed an infinitely long time. When he finally did speak, I felt like an intelligent fin de siècle priest who, having been given a copy of Darwin, sits now staring at the unopened book, not so much fearing that he won’t be able to accept the book’s truths, as that the great world, which for so long in his mind has looked one way, will, by his simply turning a book cover, begin to look a new and totally different way.

  “It’s sadness.”

  Sadness?

  “Sadness?” I exclaimed gleefully. “Why, Paddy! You’re a goddam drunken Irish poet!”

  I laughed and laughed and laughed.

  Paddy did not care. He had told me what he had found on the ceiling, in the smoke rings, and in the furious notes he had taken at the AA meetings. He was off and running now; had I risen and walked away from him, he would have told his story to my empty chair. It was hardly different from any of those we had heard at the meetings, one long grievous history of lying, cheating, and stealing for booze, and in the wake of that story an aggrieved mother and father, a heartbroken wife, neglected children. The thing that impressed me most was that Paddy, in the end, turned out to be barely literate, having no gift for words, and it was this groping search for words that touched me most.

  “I’ll never drink again!” he said, perfectly exultant. “Don’t yuh get it? And in that way I’ll never cause another’s sadness!” Then he rose and looked directly at me. “And tell me, wise guy—ain’t that enough?”

  I rose, too, and looked at him. “Whatever you say, Duke,” I said glibly. Then I smiled. Then I walked away.

  I will live my life a lesser man for having done that, for having walked away from him. Despite his arrogant ignorance, Paddy was a poet. It was when he was leaving the next day that I discovered this and understood that Paddy had come to a kind of truth, the truth for himself, a truth that to this day will not let me divorce the term alcoholism from sadness. I had been in the library, and, having exhausted my cigarettes, had walked back for some to the ward, to notice that it was unusually crowded for that time of day, with men occupying most of the chairs, smoking and shifting uneasily. When I asked what was up, the answer was swiftly curt, even a little fierce—”Big Shit’s leavin’ “—and I knew that Paddy the Duke’s departure from Avalon Valley was going to be like no other departure before or since. _

  When other men left, we crowded round and shouted, “Good luck, Buddy!” and “Don’t let us see yuh back here yuh hear?” and “Don’t let the shits”—for that is how the insiders view the outsiders—”get yuh down!” Those of us who believed, prayed; those of us who wept, wept; and those of us who had begun to wonder if we were ever getting out, died a little. But I could see in the men’s faces, in the cold, silent sneers, that this was going to be different, even a little terrible, a backbiting, clawing affair—”So long, yuh prick!”—that kind of furious, unnecessary thing—something I knew I didn’t want to watch. But I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I would have said, “Look, he’s just a crazy Irish bastard,” if I had thought it would have done any good. But I knew that it wouldn’t. Seeing Snow White slouched down in a chair, seemingly indifferent to the proceeding, I walked over, took an empty chair next to him, and lit a cigarette. He didn’t speak to me. The cigarette was about half-smoked when there was an audible rustling, all heads were being turned to the back of the ward. Having just emerged from the sleeping room, Paddy was standing there facing us.

  There are certain appeals that quite startle and benumb the heart: Hamlet the Dane’s “Hamlet, remember me” to his son; Hester’s “Surely, surely, we have ransomed one another, with all this woe!” to the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale; Willie Stark’s “It might have been all different, Jack… . You got to believe that” to Jack Burden; I thought of one such appeal looking at Paddy. I thought of Holden Caulfield’s line when his sister Phoebe was riding round and round on the carousel in the rain—”God, I wish you could’ve been there.” The state had given him a neat, black wool topcoat, a cheap though nice-looking brown suit, and a pair of sleek-black, patent-leather shoes. In his right hand he carried a small Gladstone bag, containing, no doubt, the entire viaticum of a life spent badly; still he looked, from that distance where one could not deter-

  him, mine the material worth of his outfit, like a man just stepped off a plane at some World Capital, a man bound on a mission of forbidding gravity.

  Seeing us, he paused only momentarily—and smiled. Though there was nothing deprecatory in that smile, there was nevertheless a patina of defiance, as though he knew what kind of a farewell we had planned for him and did not care. Now he began the walk by us up the long ward. He walked more slowly than usual, taking those precise, military steps walking by one, then another, of us, much as he had walked, by us in the cafeteria. Never again would he cast his eyes upon us. Our breaths suspended momentarily. He went by another, and still another of us, by the orange and blue chairs, walking by us at the same time that our breaths, in expiration, became as audible as thunder. When he reached the middle of the ward, then passed it, I knew suddenly—knew that no one was going to call after him. I knew because Paddy had the power. Call it sadness or whatever, he had used his time among us wisely, he would never inflict pain on another again—and, yes, he was right: he would make it! Paddy was almost at the door now, and we stood behind him, too ashamed of our timidity to look at each other. I suppose there even came a moment (at least there did for me) when we hoped he would look back at us, come back with a tentative wave, the suggestion of a smile, hoped that he would leave us something. But Paddy was indeed a man with a grave mission—that of living without causing pain. Without turning (though he did, I think, pause ever so slightly), he went through the door, out of Avalon Valley and the squalor of our lives. When he was gone, I turned furiously on my heels and fled into the lavatory. I did so, for I, who before going down the hill had vowed not to get close to another so as not to experience the hurt of his defeat, ended, ironically, by breaking under another’s victory, and I did not want Snow White or those others—lest they misunderstand—to see the tears streaming down my face.

  Paddy the Duke was right. I had one more “tour of duty” to put in at the funny farm. They turned me loose a few days after he left, sometime in the winter months of 1959, but in a little more than a year’s time I would be back at Avalon Valley; and I would be a very sick man. Moreover, I would by then be properly humbled and prepared to go back into the past in search of the reasons, prepared, like Paddy, to stare at the ceiling and remember. My biggest problem was where to begin, for I have no doubt that the obstetrician no sooner swats the infant’s buttocks inducing the hysterical scream of life than that a certain milieu is prepared and waiting for him, a milieu in which already the shadows and shades exist which will determine whether he goes to Avalon Valley or the White House. I thought finally that I had best begin by filling up those five years between my journey to the Polo Grounds and my arrival at the private hospital. I thought I had best begin in Chicago.

  4/ Onhava Regained and Lost Again

  In the days when I lived in Chicago, I twice fell in love. I fell in love first with that golden city—my Onhava!—by the blue lake, and then with Bunny Sue Allorgee. It was a splendid arrangement, first the city and then the dream maiden, for love, in its awful intimacy, demands to be played out against familiar backdrops. When, one blustery June morning, Bunny Sue walked into my life, I was so altogether in love with that city that I did not quite believe in its essentialness, its palpability, and it was against this inessential, this glittering crepe city that I acted out my dream of bliss. It seems of little consequence to me now that Bunny was to say, “Oh, no!” —was to decide against admitting my love—or that then the loveliness would go out of my city, rendering it as bleak and debauched as ever Gomorrah was. It seems of little con sequence because for a few precious moments—as long, per haps, as it is g
iven to any man—I was buoyed up, in a state of exhilarating and dizzying weightlessness, by love, and had the whole world by the short hair.

  Bunny Sue was the consummation of many long months of incredible, nearly unspeakable apprehension—months in

  which I had, like the mad Kinbote, lived my life in exile, waiting to sail back and recover my lost kingdom of Zembla. That kingdom was always a “dim iridescence”—a place above and beyond the next precipice; but I always knew that at any moment, the very next no doubt, the world’s colors would fall into place and define themselves. They merely assumed their focus in the taffy, benumbing presence of Bunny Sue. And though I had always expected them to do so, I was, I expect, left quite as speechless by the girl as if I had never anticipated her.

  A few days after my journey to the Polo Grounds, I got a job. I would like to believe that my cheering for Owen had rendered my countenance more amenable to prospective employers, but this was not the case. Exhausted by the long months of my defeat, I combed my hair, had my suit cleaned, walked into the personnel department of the New York Central Railroad, and told the man I would take anything he had to offer. He took me at my word—giving me anything: a job as clerk-trainee in the passenger department at a pittance. But my luck was beginning to change, and in a few weeks I had an impossibly splendid job in that company’s public relations department. Robert R. Young, the powder-haired, tassel-toed, dapper little financier out of Texas, had just won control of the company in that now-famous proxy war and was, as his first order of business, “clearing the deadwood” (twenty thou sand employees) from the Central’s payroll. In all the time I was with the railroad, this onslaught on the “featherbedders” seemed to be his only policy. He was more than anything, I think, a phrasemaker—”A hog can cross country without changing trains, but you can’t”—and because he seemed to have no clear-cut policy, we gentlemen in public relations, as near as I could determine, were expected to do little more than sit in our cubicles, pick our noses, clean our fingernails, watch Young brush away the scarabs, and wait for reporters to telephone with questions we wouldn’t, even if we knew the answers, be permitted to answer. Which is as good a definition of public relations as any.