A Fan's Notes

by Frederick Exley

  Even after we had checked into the One Fifth Avenue Hotel, and while J. was preparing to go on the town and I was lying atop the bed, we kept shaking our heads in farcical wonder, as though saying, “Imagine? Tickets from Conerly!” It was our way of agreeing that in the conspiracy we had had for so many years this was our grandest success to date, something to really make the boys back home sit up and take notice. Though genuine—where Holden Caulfield might want to call up old Tom Hardy, and S. N. Behrman, Max Beerbohm, there was no one I’d have rather talked with than Conerly—my enthusiasm was colored by an ulterior motive, that of being pleasant till J. was safely out of the room. With the peculiar canniness of the alcoholic, I had figured out a way to drink all I pleased, and drink it out of the pained view of my friend. Worse yet, having been the one who was responsible for getting the tickets, and with the drunk’s really monstrous perspective on the nature of things (it wasn’t enough that J. was paying for the tickets and the hotel), I honestly felt I had a right to do what I was about to do. Beginning by telling J., amidst some histrionic yawns and superb sighs, that I was really too, too exhausted to go on the town, I now lay on the bed feigning a heavy slumber and squinting at J. through the curtain of my eyelashes. Though J. was disappointed and asked me a dozen times if I wouldn’t change my mind, I think he took my abstinence as a hopeful omen and in his voice there was no real insistence. Spruced up and standing by the door, he asked me once again if I wouldn’t reconsider, to which I really outdid myself. Fixing on him the most doleful eyes, and in martyr-like, near sotto voce tones, I said, “No, really. You go ahead and have yourself a good time.” The door was no sooner closed than I was up, showered, shaved, dressed, and in a matter of minutes sitting at the hotel bar drinking a Vodka Presbyterian and as happy as a fat man in a delicatessen, looking lustfully at all the bottles on the back bar. I could drink as much as I could hold. All I had to do was sign the bar tab with J.’s signature and room number.

  To those who understand the slightness of an American’s traditions, the place of sports in his life, and New York City’s need to make do with what it has (the stadium, for instance, is a nearly impossible place to watch football), the Yankee Stadium can be a heart-stopping, an awesomely imposing place, and never more so than on a temperate and brilliant afternoon in late November. The vivid reds and oranges, the plaids and tans, the golds and greens of autumn clothing flicker incessantly across the way where the stadium, rising as sheer as a cliff, is one quivering mass of color out of which there comes continually, like music from a monstrous kaleidoscope, the unending roar of the crowd. And where I have been in Los Angeles’ vast Coliseum and Chicago’s monumental Soldiers’ Field and able to imagine it, I am yet unable to imagine a young man coming for the first time out of those dugouts at that moment just prior to kickoff when the stadium is all but bursting its great steel beams with people. I am incapable of imagining stepping out and craning my head upward at the roaring cliff of color, wondering whether it be all a dream which might at any moment come tumbling down, waking me to life’s hard fact of famelessness. The stadium stays. The game proceeds. Autumnal mists set in. At half time the stadium’s floodlights are turned on; so that the colors, with each change of light, change, too—become muted, become brighter again, like a leaf going from vivid green to lemon yellow to wine red to rust brown, reminding one that time is passing, that time indeed is running out. It was that kind of a day, that kind of an hour, when the Giants, losing - with two minutes remaining, came hurriedly to the line of scrimmage, eighty yards from a touchdown and a possible tie. Gifford, whom I was of course watching, had neither thrown off his sluggishness nor played particularly well. Nevertheless, I knew that Quarterback George Shaw, who was substituting for an ailing Conerly, would make the play to him. I knew he would because men under pressure believe in miracles and see what they want to see. Shaw would not, of course, pass to the Gifford who was even now flanked wide to the left side of the field but to some memory of the ball player he once had been.

  J. thought otherwise, predicting that Shaw would pass to another.

  “Don’t be absurd,” I snapped, and J. looked at me with great surprise, causing me to flush with embarrassment. Though I’m sure he didn’t understand the reason, I could see by his expression that he had gauged my temper correctly. J. saw that I was afraid.

  For a few delirious moments Gifford made me forget my fear and the crowd eat crow for their rumors of his lost heart. In the same way that Shaw perhaps threw to some memory of him, he became that memory. Running one of his favorite patterns, he caught his first pass by moving straight up the left side of the field, beautifully faking one defender to the outside. Abruptly cutting in front of another, he had, when he caught the ball, eluded both defenders and to the deafening roar of the crowd was at mid-field when he was finally tackled. Pummeling and pounding J. on the back, I shouted, “Oh, Jesus, Frank! Atta way! Atta way, kid!” The next play was an all-or-nothing post pattern, i.e., the receiver runs full speed for the goal posts, and the quarterback drops straight back into the pocket and heaves for those posts. Running swiftly and looking back for the ball, having lost the goal posts from his distracted vision and fearful of running into them, Bob Schnelker dropped a lovely, a high, thrilling, perfectly trajected pass. There was scarcely a moan. So sure was the crowd now that it was going to be their day, they seemed happily undaunted. Nor was I any longer upset. Now the Giants were at the line of scrimmage again, and again Gifford was flanked wide left. Running what seemed the precise pattern he had run before, and to another thundering roar of the crowd, he made the catch at about the Philadelphia thirty and was moving later ally across the field toward us, trying even as he ran to find a way by Philadelphia’s two deep men, now converging on him, and into the end zone. The crowd was wild. The crowd was maniacal. The crowd was his. J. was the one who noticed Chuck Bednarik, Philadelphia’s—there are no adjectives to properly describe him—linebacker. “Watch out for Bednarik,” he said. Hearing J., I turned to see Bednarik coming from behind Gifford out of his linebacking zone, pounding the turf furiously, like some fierce animal gone berserk. I watched Bednarik all the way, thinking that at any second Gifford would turn back and see him, whispering, “Watch it, Frank. Watch it, Frank.” Then, quite suddenly, I knew it was going to happen; and accepting, with the fatalistic horror of a man anchored by fear to a curb and watching a tractor trailer bear down on a blind man, I stood breathlessly and waited. Gifford never saw him, and Bednarik did his job well. Drop ping his shoulder ever so slightly, so that it would meet Gifford in the region of the neck and chest, he ran into him without breaking his furious stride, thwaaahhhp, taking Gifford’s legs out from under him, sending the ball careening wildly into the air, and bringing him to the soft green turf with a sickening thud. In a way it was beautiful to behold. For what seemed an eternity both Gifford and the ball had seemed to float, weightless, above the field, as if they were performing for the crowd on the trampoline. About five minutes later, after unsuccessfully trying to revive him, they lifted him onto a stretcher, looking, from where we sat high up in the mezzanine, like a small, broken, blue-and-silver manikin, and carried him out of the stadium.

  In a fist fight that night I got badly beaten up. I could have avoided the fight, but the day’s events, coupled with the long years of my defeat, made me seek out a less subtle defeat. On arriving downtown, J. and I passed the time over a scarcely eaten meal of lasagna and sausage, drinking Chianti, and waiting for the morning newspapers. Though J. had business in Watertown in the morning, he lingered with me; and after a time—such was the blandness of our forced conversation—I began to suspect he was playing nursemaid to me, as though he were sure that once out of his protective view I would embark on something disastrous. By acting much too falsely cheerful I didn’t allay his suspicions. On the back pages of the News and Mirror the headlines proclaimed, “Gifford Out for Season,” and the articles on the inside said he would be hospitalized for two weeks with a sever
e concussion. Both stories implied his career was at an end. None of this was news to me: I had already guessed as much. What I hadn’t guessed at was the odd bellicosity Gifford would display at retiring. At a press conference the following spring he would tell the assembled reporters, speaking rather too pugnaciously, and pre facing his singular remark with that saw about football’s having been good to him, that his decision to retire was in no way predicated on the concussion. No one who saw that tackle could have doubted that it was the precise reason for his quit ting; or that, in some ways, it was inexorable. It was the rather brutal homage the league was paying him for catching one too many passes, for winning one too many games, for frustrating and disheartening the opponent one too many times; and I had no doubt that had it not been Bednarik, the next play, or the next game, or the next season, it would have been some other, perhaps more leonine, Bednarik. On reading his exasperating remark, I immediately rose, went out and bought a copy of every New York newspaper, returned, and read their accounts with equal diligence. Searching for the slightest nuance, I wanted to see if any of the reporters had greeted his remark with, if not outright laughter, a splattering of levity. Because none had, I assumed Gifford’s posture at the conference had been one of muscle-flexing aggressiveness. The re porters had faced him, or apparently they had, with a straight-faced and obliging solemnity. I understood perfectly. With a magnanimous gravity not unlike that of the reporters, people were at this time meeting my protestations that I could quit drinking any time I chose. Thus it was that at the end, or at what Gifford and I must have believed would be the end for him, it gave me some consolation that we were both addicted to something—he to football and I to liquor—capable of destroying us, if not actually, in humiliation and loss of pride.

  For the first time since the beginning, when so many autumns before we had had the common ground of large hopes, we were, in our separate ways, coming round to the most terrible knowledge of all: we were dying. And that was the inescapable truth. Though I was some time in articulating it, in that limp and broken body against the green turf of the stadium, I had had a glimpse of my own mortality. As much as anything else, that fist fight was a futile rage against the inevitability of that mortality.

  After reading the papers J. and I went for a walk and ended standing on a corner of Times Square. We talked about nothing in particular until J., getting anxious about the time and the long drive ahead of him, became abruptly solicitous of me and asked whether I had the money for the train trip to Scars-dale. When I spoke, I looked directly at him. “I’ve got to have more money than that,” I said. With no sense of authority, he replied, “Go home, Ex. For Christ’s sake, go home.” To that I essayed a fitful and nauseating little jig. Resignedly removing his wallet from his pocket, J. took from it a ten-dollar bill and laid it in my eagerly outstretched hand. Turning quickly, and without saying good-bye, he walked away. Furious and pained, I stood for a moment watching the garish, meaningless lights of the square, listening to the shamed, embarrassed throbbings of my heart. When finally I turned back, wanting to call to him and shout my apologies, he was gone, lost among the strangers on the street.

  Fifteen minutes later I was standing in the middle of Sheridan Square in the Village, staring up at a towering new apartment house of brick and stone. I walked to the curb and stared at the place where it had been. Now I walked backward to the middle of the square again, looked up, then to my right and to my left—seeking my bearings, making sure that I was indeed at Sheridan Square. I was. Louis’ was not there. Trying to recapture a feeling of the future, and thinking that in that place, at least momentarily, I would be able to bear myself back into a time when there had been hope, I had come back to Louis’ to drink draft beer. After J. had left without saying good-bye, in panic I had fled back to the past only to discover that even the building where Louis’ had been was gone, and that another, a gaudy, whory-looking monstrosity stood in its stead. The past was not there.

  After several frantic inquiries in the neighborhood, I got the address of the new Louis’ and went there. But it wasn’t the same, depressing me even more than Clarke’s had the day before. Where the old place, as one descended the steps, had seemed to rise up at one, a subterranean and enchanted place, a place of infinite promise, the new Louis’ on Eighth Street was a long, narrow, characterless bar at street level. After drinking a beer or two, I had decided to go uptown and drink at one of the hotel bars near Grand Central when, looking up into the mirror, which was crossed with a wooden X, I saw on one side of the X my doleful, puffy face, and on the other, a young girl, sipping beer and weeping silently. Great, globule-like tears streaked effortlessly down her thin though pretty face. She was about nineteen. Her hair, which was brown and flecked with natural streaks of gold, and which must once have been lovely, was now lank with poor care; and when I turned, I saw that her arms were sticklike, as though they would break to the touch, and that her hands, which were beautiful in form, and delicate, were smudged with dirt. Conscious of the dirt, in an almost compulsive way she covered first her right hand with her left, and then her left with her right, as if she wanted to be a beatnik and then again did not, as if she did not have the gumption to play the role she had assumed for herself. Her breasts were much too big for the slenderness of her frame, and I was sure that in a very short time she had lost a great deal of weight.

  Two hours later she told me why. By this time I had gone through most of the ten dollars J. had given me, buying us both beers. In an effort to see her laugh I had been making “funnies.” When I finally succeeded, she took her laughter as an indication of our lifelong palship and to my dismay began telling her story. I say dismay because the story was like a million others in the Village, and she understood it no better than most. At the end of her sophomore year in an esteemed women’s college, she had persuaded her father to let her come for the summer to Washington Square and take some art courses, art being her interest. (She never for a moment understood that she came for the express purpose of being fucked.) She had been lonely for some days; but at the first party to which she was invited, she had met a big, brusque, sandaled, red-bearded poet who, within the first three hours of their meeting, had convinced her that her father was beyond absolution because he sold refrigerators, had read her poetry she didn’t comprehend, had got her sauced, had slapped her face, and had, or so she claimed, deflowered her, leaving her exhausted to fall asleep in her virginal blood. When she awoke, though, she was “in love, terribly so”; and during the past summer she and Big Red had been “deliriously happy.” (She meant that for the first time she was getting it on a bed on her back, trying to reach the ceiling with her ecstatically kicking legs.) As fall approached and it became time to return to school, she panicked and telephoned the refrigerator sales man. By cajolery and weeping, by threats against her own person, and finally by threatening to withdraw her filial affection from him, she persuaded Pop to let her remain and enroll in art school in Manhattan. This was a piece of jolly news which Big Red met by disappearing. At first she was bewildered, then heart-broken; and when, after he hadn’t shown up for a number of days, and by a minimum of checking—for Big Red was luridly indiscreet—she made inquiries, she discovered that the poet was quite contentedly married to a bleached blonde and the father of three freckled and red headed sons, all of whom, to the greater glory of poetry no doubt, were carried on the city’s relief rolls. On the night I talked with her, she had long since dropped out of her art courses; and for the past two months she had been going to three movies a day, weeping whether the picture was happy or sad, and living off popcorn and orange soda.

  What the hell could I say? I understood Big Red, but not her—or rather, I understood her all too well. When she recovered, she would go home, marry a Yale man, and her life would be one long tale of self-deceit. I wanted to tell her to go home, to slap her face, to shake the shit out of her and insist that she go home. Instead, by way of an object lesson, I told her about my own early days in
the Village and how all these years I had carried with me this memory of place only to discover that very day that that was what the Village was—a memory, a dream, a myth. Go home, I said, and forget it. “It doesn’t exist.”