A Fan's Notes

by Frederick Exley

  If the section was not the Village, it was precisely named; the Near North Side was near to everything. In the morning we descended into the subways and were in a matter of minutes conveyed to the Loop where, after cursorily put ting in our days at the altar of commerce, we fled back to Babylon. The bars—The Singapore, Larry’s Lounge, Mister Kelley’s, Gus’ Pub—along Rush Street (Chicago’s “White Way”) were within five minutes’ walking distance from any place in the area; in those saloons those genial young men, corn-bred girls, and I nightly got quite happily, quite absurdly, drunk. In the summer we sat around gallon thermoses of vodka and tonic, as tribesmen around the beneficent fire, taking the sun on the most exhilarating city lake front in the world (I have never seen any other, so I suffer from no competing claims). Behind us rose the dizzying turrets of Chicago’s skyline, pale and iridescent facades rising into the azure heavens, buildings all constructed, it seemed, for nothing save the pleasure of our eyes. At evening we wandered from one apartment to another, as from one room in a house to another, as if the entire Near North Side were but a single mansion to which we had a standing invitation. We flirted crudely and blatantly with other men’s dates, grabbing them in the kitchen or on a stairway and, kissing them, our tongues exploratory even as our hands caressed a breast or buttock, demanding some promise for the future (engaged in such nefariousness one night, I got knocked cold by a male dancer from a musical comedy’s road show who, for the obvious reasons, I had assumed wasn’t really interested in the leggy creature he was with; it was a sucker punch, but I was never permitted to forget it, and in its way it was rather amusing: truth-seeking, virile, haughty Freddy Exley laid out cold on the kitchen linoleum, his limbs limp and all askew, laid out by a fag—or what had seemed to be one—his buddies helpfully pouring iced highballs into his reposeful countenance). If we were lucky—or not, as the case might be—we ended in the sack with some long-legged, energetic, none-too-bright airline hostess who afterward wept while we assured her of our un dying devotion, even as we plotted how to get rid of the creep.

  These were, for me at least, days of lust—days in which, for the first time since my rejection by the girl back east, my moroseness had vanished and I discovered I was not altogether unattractive to women. I sat in those saloons with them, sipping highballs, and through the muted light of the place whispered outrageous falsehoods into their pink ears. My hand dropped into their laps to feel their thighs tighten and reject my fingers with the rigidity of their virtue. Continuing to whisper and sip my drink, I felt the flesh go submissive, and had to restrain myself from laughing. If I took them home —and occasionally after the thighs went loose as sand and the challenge no longer provoked me, I packed them off in cabs —they always fought, pounding, not fiercely, their tense little knuckles against my chest, to which I smilingly said, “Cut the shit.” I took them on the floor and on the couch and in the bathtub, took them with their summer dresses up around their ears, took them greedily, perfunctorily, pointlessly, took them while they wept and said no, no, no. Occasionally in a baseness of spirit, I acceded to their demands and withdrew the sweets of my sex, which only seemed to make them weep more heartily. Afterward, smoking a cigarette, I kissed without feeling their pink ears, gone white now in the slackening of the blood. I kissed their flushed faces, their perspiration-coated upper lips, their straw-yellow hair, and even their little knuckles, flushed now too from the half-assed insistence on their probity. I never left till they asked when we would meet again. To that I always said, “Soon, kid, soon,” patted them sportingly on the back, and departed.

  How did I accomplish these seductions? My comely irresistibility? My brute strength? My subtle charms? Well, no, not really; I was neither comely, brutal, nor subtle. I knew something of America’s vulgar yearnings (whose were more vulgar than mine?), and I played on these unmercifully. One had to estimate the lass. What precisely was the character of the copulating organ she deemed fit to invade her downy-matted sanctuary? What were her intellectual habits? Movie Screen? I was Cecil Rhodes, Warner Brothers’ Chicago representative currently promoting Burt Lancaster’s latest epic. “Burt’ll be in town a week from Tuesday.” I’d yawn then. “Like to have you meet him if you’re free. Nice guy. A little swishy like all of them”—one couldn’t grant any of them man hood!—”but what the hell!” Reader’s Digest? I was Jonathan Surgrit, cancer researcher at the Ogilvy Labs, Inc. “You know —out in Evanston?” I would look intently over the back bar, searching, I guess, for the cancer virus between the Seven Crown and the Calvert bottles. Taking a remorseful, furious drag on my cigarette, I’d crush it to a pulpy, scabrous pile of malignancy in the ashtray, suck in my breath, and proclaim, “That’s the last cigarette you’ll ever see me smoke!”

  I was all these gentlemen and more, though after a time I settled finally on my favorite, the surgeon-in-residence at the House of High Hopes, young Dr. Horatio Penis (spelled alarmingly, pronounced with Gallic gentility). “Doc Pahnee,” I always introduced myself. “P-e-n-i-s. Friends call me Hor.” Like Horatio I was steadfast, unobtrusive, gentle, humorless, not unintelligent, and I spent my entire evening, as I hope the good Horatio did on his Prince’s death, “absenting myself from felicity.” I never looked at my date. Sipping pensively on my vodka (I had heard all physicians drank vodka), I would stare morosely off into space, conscious of her eyes upon me. Of what was I thinking? The cataracts I had to remove from Mayor Daley’s eyes at eight in the morning? The grapefruit-sized tumor on the philanthropic society matron’s coccyx? No. I was thinking of what she was thinking. That I could have saved her favorite aunt, Aunt Maudie up in Sheboygan, who had died under a butcher’s knife? Was she answering the telephone in our suburban split-level? “Dr. Pahnee’s residence. Mrs. Pah-nee speaking.” Who knows? After a time, a kind of melancholy would descend on me.

  “What are you thinking about, Dr.—uh—Hor?”

  “It’s my hands.”

  Uncertainly: “Your hands?”

  With shattering finality: “My hands.”

  “What’s the matter with your hands?”

  I would hold them out to her now, backs upward; there would be the slightest tremor.

  “I don’t see nothin’. They look beautiful to me—just like a surgeon’s hands should!” She might take them in her own hands now.

  “They’re trembling. Can’t you see they’re trembling?” Now sadly, impatiently: “And, oh, good Christ, I’ve got an OGL-33 at six in the morning!” I paused a moment. “I suppose I ought to get married. All this goddam running around. I’ve got human life—do you understand that? Human life!—in my hands!”

  She would squeeze those noble hands then and look lingeringly into my glazed, troubled eyes, as though to say, “I understand, I’ll make it well.” Afterward once, lying in pleasurable exhaustion on the beige carpeting, smoking a cigarette and staring off into the dedicated, medicinal corridors of my life, I had one of those corn-bred barbarians, lying all asweat next to me and gripping and ungripping my leg with her luscious blond thighs, purr, “There ain’t nothin’ wrong with your hands, Doc!”

  Alone at the distance of time and miles I am wondering if I were as happy then as I believed I was. I know there came a time when I wept, actually wept, bawled like a baby, thinking I did so for the incredible fullness of my days; but I am wondering now if the tears weren’t induced by some quite other reasons. I was sitting with the boys in one of the dives along Rush Street, discussing football and the sexual expertise of a certain neighborhood girl, when I noticed a woman who took my breath away seated at the far end of the bar. She was seated with a woman I knew, a woman who, in her own way, was extremely beautiful, too—that is, she was physically beautiful. She was a well-paid copywriter in a large advertising agency and was often, unjustly, accused of being Lesbian. It was her own fault. She was one of those horrifying Betty Friedan types, disliked not for her intelligence (as they all believe they’re disliked) but because she had competed so long among men that she had u
tterly defeminized herself—done so to the point where even sex was on her conditions, entered into on her suggestion and carried out with a kind of militarily sad-comic precision, a couple minutes of this, two more of that, did you ever try this, Frederick?— utterly devoid of any romanticism. I liked her in a pitying way, the only way one can like someone who has dehumanized herself. I wanted a girl I could take on the kitchen table before dinner, inhaling the pungent odors of boiled cabbage; or in the front seat of the car at the drive-in movie, Cary Grant or no Cary Grant throwing his ninety-foot-high techni-color shadow on her behind; or—well, wherever the spirit moved me. I did not, in other words, want to make Huxley-like Tuesday afternoon appointments with my spouse.

  And the girl she was with looked like one who would take it on a chair-lift dreamily ascending Mount Aspen. She was about thirty. Her features were fine, and her ebony-black hair, parted in the middle, was pulled taut to her head, American Indian style, and brought together in a great firm chignon at the curve of the back of her neck, a chignon so perfect that I thought it might be fake. In the muted light her skin seemed of the most incredibly golden texture, and her pulpous flesh, what I could see of it, looked the kind that, though infinitely soft, would in passion be as hard, hot, and animated as a stripper’s pelvis. She seemed to me altogether exquisite, and I paid her the compliment, from time to time, of staring lengthily and boldly at her, a boldness she countered by staring right back. I was lucky in one way. The boys I was with were very aware of her, too (we were all staring like crazy, and, on the isles of our separate vanities, were, I suppose, imagining that her stares were returned to us alone), but none of them had apparently ever received one of the copywriter’s abrupt invitations and assumed the woman was already spoken for. I didn’t enlighten them; there ensued a memorable conversation.

  Speaking with a casualness that attempted to imply that his words had no relationship to anyone in the room, somebody said, “You know, if I was a broad, I could see bein’ a fucking queer.” “How do yuh figure that?” someone else said. “I mean, I can see a couple broads rubbin’ their lovely knockers against each other—and soul-kissin’ and—well, whatever it is they do to each other.” We all laughed—except one of us. “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard of,” he said. “What’s so stupid about it?” the first said indignantly. “Well, let’s put it this way. If you was a normal broad, I suppose that you could imagine that if you were a guy, you could see yourself rollin’ around a clover field with Rocky Marciano. But I don’t sup pose Rocky would dig it too much.” We all laughed again. The first man was insistent. “Naw. There’s somethin’ nauseating about a couple hairy-chested, sweaty bastards rollin’ around a bed together. But broads are different. I mean— they’re delicate and clean and all. I mean, I don’t have any trouble visualizin’ a couple of well-scrubbed broads …” Someone started singing, “The girl that I marry will have to be …” Someone else, in obvious agreement with the sarcasm of the singer, said, “Clean? Go take a look in the lady’s can. You wouldn’t—and you’re kind of a grubby bastard—even sit down on the goddam toilet seat!” It was a bad day for the advocate of Lesbos. “Delicate, your ass,” still another man said. “You know what my Uncle Louis—you know, the one out in Hollywood?—you know what he was tellin’ me?” We admitted that we didn’t. “He was tellin’ me that Rudolph Valentino used to keep a goddam hanky under his goddam armpit and right at the goddam moment he was comin’, he’d shove the goddam sweaty thing right in the broad’s nostrils!” We didn’t quite get the point. Detecting this, the man exclaimed emphatically, “And they loved it!” We had to think about that for a moment. For the first time in the conversation, someone decided to be relevant. He said, “Your Uncle Louis owns a goddam delicatessen, for Christ’s sake!”

  That is the kind of Chicago conversation I remember, arguments begun on hopelessly puerile foundations and, out of boredom, carried to impossibly ludicrous limits. This one continued until it disintegrated into a hilarious sobriety. We had by then a barful of change with which we were going to call Uncle Louis in Hollywood, to get the word straight from the baloney peddler’s mouth. Someone, though, said he wouldn’t take Uncle Louis’ word for it—poor Uncle Louis!—even if he had been Valentino’s goddam hairdresser. “I mean, how does anybody know crap like that?” We got into some name-calling after that, some threats and counter-threats, and then angrily began drifting off one by one. By midnight I, except for the two women at the far end, was the only one left at the bar. After that I breathed easier —decided against any need for making the move. I did not even look down that way again. It worked. A few minutes before closing time, the copywriter came down, tapped me on the shoulder (I acted surprised), fetched me back, and made the introductions.

  “You want to go?” I said.

  Her sense of the Tightness of things was undermined. “Aren’t you going to buy me a drink?” she asked. She smiled pleasantly.

  “You coming or not?” I said. My voice was not pleasant. I was twenty-six, and had the power, and believed that I would always have it.

  Over the objections of the copywriter, she came. And she turned out to have the most incredibly lovely body I had ever seen; even now I can see every contour of it, the muscular tautness of her thighs, the fullness of her breasts, all covered by a skin more golden than I had even imagined in the flattering light of the bar, a skin which, even as I lay smoking in interim periods—for such was my need I never slept that night—I had to keep my free hand on, on the hard plain of her stomach, on the sloping hill of her thigh, touch her even as she slept next to me, slept till I reawoke her. I had to touch her because the city’s bounty to me now seemed worse than incredible, as if the inessentialness that had always characterized the city had come together in the warm exquisiteness of the body beside me. And I had to touch, and touch, and touch again, to assure myself that everything was indeed real.

  She asked me to leave about six. With an evasive smile, she explained to me that her boy friend—an “elderly chap” who was “kind” to her—was due by plane into Chicago early that morning. “We’ll see each other again,” she hastened to assure me, still not looking at me. Pleased as punch—pleased? oh, “cocky” as hell—that I had been so adroit, so gymnastic, I waited, casually leaning against the door and indifferently puffing a cigarette, while she committed to paper numberless phone numbers, her own, her place of employment, and her sister’s in Oak Park, where she had been spending a lot of time in the past months. Her chatter distressed me. The numbers and names were beginning to form around her an existence apart from that incredible body on those silk sheets. She was spending a lot of time with her sister because her sister’s husband, Ronald, had just died of a heart attack. Her sister had found him on the davenport. There had been a smile on Ronald’s face. He was probably dreaming of fishing in Canada because he went there every year, the two of them went together. “Ronald liked to fish,” she said dolefully. “Oh,” I said. Taking the paper from her and putting it into my pocket, I kissed her good-bye, patted her suavely on the backside, and left. “You don’t even know my name!” she hollered after me.

  “Sure! Sure I do!” I said. “It’s on the paper!” she said, not believing me. She was right not to.

  A few minutes later I was on the Elevated weeping, not weeping but bawling like a baby. I was alone in the car, and the city, in the first flush of the morning sun, lay spread out to my left, more like a dream than I had ever imagined it. Reaching into my pocket, I removed the paper, crumpled it into a hard little ball, and threw it down to the far end of the car. What did I need with names and addresses? The city gave everything to one, and I bawled like a goddam madman to be so lucky, never for a moment dreaming that I might be bored. I bawled until I was hysterical, coughing great globs of phlegm into my hands, and knowing for certain, as Henry James’s Marcher knew forever about the beast that lurked in his soul, that if ever that life was going to come to me, that life that would be so much more striking than
other men’s, that it was going to come to me in that city, Chicago. A few days later I met Bunny Sue.

  Bunny Sue was nineteen. She had honey-blond, bobbed hair and candid, near-insolent green eyes. She had a snub, delightful nose, a cool, regal, and tapering neck, a fine, intelligent mouth that covered teeth so startling they might have been cleansed by sun gods. Without any makeup save lipstick, her complexion was as milk flecked with butter, the odor she cast as wholesome as homemade bread. On my first breathless vision of her, I wanted to bury my teeth, Dracula-like, into her flanks, knowing that she would bleed pure butterscotch. Her walk quite bowled me over. Slightly toed-out, she didn’t so much walk as bounce, skip with the imposing, almost forbid ding temerity of her youth and her freshness—so god-awfully sure she was that these were the eternal and unvarying constants of her existence. She was the girl next door who only yesterday ran around the yard with pee in her pants. She was Hudson’s Rima, Spenser’s Una, Humbert Humbert’s Dolly. She was the scarcely pubescent girl modeling the Chesterfield coat in Seventeen, resting on the haunch of one leg, the toe of the pump of the free leg aimed squarely at the firmament, suggesting that that place was no less than her destination. She was Wordsworth’s Lucy, Tristan’s Iseult, Poe’s Annabel Lee. But, oh, she was so very American. She was the Big Ten coed whose completeness is such that a bead of perspiration at the temple is enough to break the heart. She was the Sweetheart of Sigma Chi—well, no, not precisely; precisely she was the only sophomore in the history of Michigan or Illinois or Indiana to be chosen, above all those other honey-dipped girls, Home coming Queen. And finally, she was Chicago’s impossible, nearly obscene gift to me. She was the girl I had sought to allay my grief at USC and been too leper-like to find, the girl I had sought all my nights in the Village, and the girl for whom I had waited way off there at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. Within moments of looking at her, I knew it was she.