A Fan's Notes

by Frederick Exley

  The other man we knew, a would-be musical comedy star who was always bouncing breathlessly in and out of the apartment announcing that he was flying to the Coast on Monday for a screen test or becoming a newscaster on TV for five hundred a week the first of the month, was living with and off of a wealthy refugee from Castro’s Cuba named Chiquita. Deciding to circumvent our friend, who was generally so busy studying himself in the mirror he never listened to one any way, we went directly to Chiquita for the dough. She said it wasn’t nice to ask for money on Christmas Eve. At three in the morning, three nights later, we heard a guttural, falsetto baritone singing, “If I loved you, Tiiimmme and again I would try to say …” Opening the front door, we found our friend and Chiquita heavy-laden with three cases of beer, Ritz crack ers, potato chips, cheese dip, and cigarettes. The Counselor and I ate, drank, and smoked voraciously while, to the ap proving and adoring nods of Chiquita, our friend sang the entire scores of Carousel, Oklahoma! and Show Boat. He was beautiful, too. By telephoning acquaintances about the country and prevaricating outrageously about misfortunes that had befallen us, we managed to get by wire enough money to live comfortably a few more weeks. Then we exhausted our acquaintances and went home.

  Because he had been so long away from his practice, and it seemed to make little difference where he set up shop, the Counselor made the gravest error of his career and decided to hang his shingle in Watertown. Neither of us understood that for us home had become a place we envisioned in much too nostalgic a way. Tail tucked in, I came back to the farm, refinished and sold a few antiques, and still without a job in August, and even after the humiliating interview with the superintendent, I signed a contract to teach at Glacial Falls. Which is what I was doing when at the New Parrot Restaurant I had what, at the time, I took to be a heart attack.

  It would be nice if I could say that on walking out of the receiving room of the hospital that Sunday I foreswore drinking, returned to Glacial Falls, made the students worship me for my sense of dedication, and became a different man. I didn’t. Each weekend I continued to journey to Watertown where, to my consternation and dismay, I found that no matter with what unctuousness I forced myself to cheer I had no interest in the game, which meant in effect no real interest in anything. As a result I took, furtively sticking my tongue out at the superintendent, to drinking during the week (which I had promised him I wouldn’t do, a promise he had no right to extract from me), twelve, fourteen, twenty glasses of beer a night. Fearing another nutritive failure, I followed this beer by gorging myself on thick cuts of prime rib or pork chops, on Italian bread larded heavily with butter, on spaghetti, linguini, or ravioli. Crowning these caloric orgies with two or three black coffees containing Tia Maria, a syrupy, cocoa-based cordial, I was home in bed within moments after eating. I took twelve hours of sluggish, dreamless sleep. Rising more lethargically than ever, and furiously gargling some mouthwash, I now faced the children without even the grace of complete sobriety. In a condition of alcoholic asperity I passed the days in the classroom, in the faculty and department meetings, and at the Italian saloon where I could invariably be found at the bar within ten minutes of school’s closing; passed the days impatiently waiting for June, when, as prescribed by school policy, I could affix passing grades to the students’ reports and get the hell out. Not being in the least needed, I sensed in cashing my pay checks the exhilaration which must accompany highway robbery. Physically I became as protean as a chameleon, able to discern the almost daily expansion of my waistline, the way my neck was increasingly sagging over the folds of my collar. After that unremitting spring of beer, pasta, Tia Maria, and futility, I found my body thirty pounds overweight, my cerebrum as dopey as a eunuch’s dong.

  To sustain a modicum of stability over the spring I went back to Hawthorne, and especially to The Scarlet Letter. My previous readings of Hawthorne had been hostile and sneering; and since so many better qualified to judge him than I esteemed him a writer of the very highest order, I went to him with the uneasiness of one prepared to make cloying amends. His obdurate and unrelieved probing of the evil in men, particularly his so shackling the characters of his somber world with scarcely bearable yokes of guilt, had aroused in me an understandable distress. In the modern and enlightened sunshine of Freud, in this Aqacreontic milieu where we were all going to be absolved of guilt and its ensuing remorse, Hawthorne had seemed to me irrelevant and spurious. Reading Hawthorne anew was revealing.. Having prostrated myself before the Freudians and found no relief there was only one of the reasons. It seemed to me I had lived long enough in the world to see that sin and remorse are as much a parcel, and a necessary parcel, of men as love and forgiveness are; moreover, not only are there certain things from which, this side of heaven, men should not be absolved (does one ever forgive the German his final solution to the Jewish “problem”?), but employing all the psychological ploys available there are acts from which men never completely absolve themselves. Read ing him in the light of this belief, I soon developed a crush on Hawthorne. I forced unanalogous parallels between his life and mine. Because these pages had begun to form themselves in my mind, the parallel I most cherished was his Custom House description of the languor which prevented him, while working surrounded by men whose existence was bounded by the succulence of past and anticipated meals, from sitting down to write The Scarlet Letter. “Teaching” children granted immunity from failure, attending meetings chaired by a man who believed what O. Henry was up to was writing, in the teachers’ room overhearing my colleagues discuss the previous night’s episode of Ben Casey, their notion of high and endur ing drama (oh, Dr. Casey, talk about the brain’s malignancies!); these things, I told myself, were producing in me a similarly impotent languor. When the summer holiday finally came, I returned to the farm, waddled my pasta-bloated body about the wide yard, looked up at the unvarying blue of the sky, and re-experienced that top-of-the-world feeling. Then I entered the house and slowly ascended the stairs to this room. Which I created, and which I love.

  In the afternoons I lay face up on a water mattress and watched the compact white clouds run down the sky, or face down looked into the blue-green water—chlorinated and temulent to the smell—of the mail-order, children’s swimming pool on which I floated. Seated in a canvas lawn chair beside me, my mother, whose face was lined with age, read to me what McCall’s and Woman’s Day and The Ladies’ Home Journal had to say about fatness. Christie III sat beside her chair, watching every move I made. It was a watching which began the day I arrived and never ceased, as though, since I had left him on the day I entered the hospital, he anticipated that at any moment I would leave him again. He was old, and around his pink and brown lips a number of white hairs had sprouted. Lettuce and green beans and asparagus, my mother read to me, had been designated “fat blasters.” It had now been determined that persons have distinct metabolic patterns and can diet forever without losing weight unless, in the one known way to break the pattern and establish new dietary habits, they fast for two days. At that suggestion my mother had looked hopefully at me. Baked beans have five hundred calories per cup. “Can you imagine?” Raising my head from the mattress, I had obliged my mother by looking incredulous. What it all amounted to was that my mother saw me old whereas she imagined me still young, and, worse, uncomely, whereas against the evidence of her eyes she wanted to find me attractive. Because I hadn’t the courage to tell her what it was I was doing, I gave her a lie to live with, telling her that in the fall I was to teach at a high school downstate. Perhaps, though, I needn’t have lied. At five, morning after morning, she had heard me in the kitchen drinking coffee, had been conscious of me all the forenoons and all the evenings filling up page upon page of blank paper; and if, surmising the fury with which I worked, she sensed that I was putting down a testament, or even if she knew this and that I had no job downstate, she never said so: she held her peace. Once she asked what I was doing upstairs. When I saturninely replied that I was “making some notes,” she said
, “Oh,” and we went back to the subject of my health. Mixing the dietary with the simplistic mysticism of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, she told me that it was his belief that if a man saw himself in one way, trim or triumphant or jolly, long enough and hard enough, he became that vision of himself. “Norman Vincent Peale,” I said, “ought to be locked up.” My mother was obstinate. “I know it’s true,” she said. So for a long time I lay on the water mattress, smelling the chlorine and slowly—as slowly as ever the clouds ran down the sky—drifted round and round in the children’s pool, thinking that perhaps it was so. But now that I no longer saw myself emblazoned on book jackets, now that I could no longer sustain my fantasy of my football empire among the islands, I could see myself hardly affirmatively at all. What I did see was a kind of poor man’s Augie seated hot afternoons at the outdoor cafe overlooking Rome’s Borghese Gardens and putting down words, in the hope not so much that they would be read or that they contained poignant or disturbing meanings as that, written more in negative apprehension, once dead I would be dumb forever—which, as Augie said, “is no reason to decline to speak and stir or to be what you are.” There was not much I had to be affirmative about. Having rejected grandiose ambitions at thirty-three, I saw myself very narrowly as a man with one suit of clothes, two thousand dollars’ life insurance (“planting” dough), and four hundred bucks in my pocket, as one who had to go away from this place, this room, and find a way to live in the world. The thought of leaving disturbed me greatly.

  Within a year and a half of our homecoming from Florida, the Counselor had been disbarred for forging a five-hundred dollar check which had been made payable both to him as attorney-of-record and to the client. Having business out of town and shy of cash, the Counselor and I had driven about one rain-swept afternoon seeking the client to get his endorsement. Unable to locate him, we had arrived at the bank only moments before its customary 3 p.m. closing; and in order that the Counselor not be held up at the cashier’s window with explanations of why he was signing the client’s name, without any misgivings I signed it. That we had so lightheartedly conspired on a “felony” indicates not only how far we had drifted from home but how little we comprehended the solemnity with which the Counselor’s colleagues wished to be taken. By the time the Counselor returned from his trip (when, as there had never been any doubt he would do, he promptly paid the client), the forgery had come to light and disbarment proceed ings were already under way. Even then the Counselor com pounded his predicament by not taking the proceedings straight-facedly enough. Imagining that he, like me, had with some of his colleagues engaged in adolescent-circle jerks; that he had known others when their countenances were being as sailed by pubescent acne (“whore boils,” we had called it); and that still others were known to him before they knew of underarm niceties and went a week at a time without under wear changes—imagining these things, I found it easy to comprehend the Counselor’s inability to accept their self-righteous little foot-stompings as celestial epiphanies. Unable to accept his attitude as a proper one, the executive committee of the local bar referred the matter to the Appellate Division, and after a most vigorous prosecution, the Counselor found himself without a license.

  Believing the Counselor the most honest man I’d ever known, and made heavy with the knowledge that the money I had accepted from him over the years would have more than tripled the amount in question, I took the disbarment harder than the Counselor did and on the streets of home collared every attorney I knew to tell him as much. One with whom both the Counselor and I had grown up, a handsome, brilliant, self-assertive man, said, “Look, Ex, these goofy bastards wanted the Counselor to grovel about their un washed behinds, and he didn’t do it. And that’s his tough luck.” It was this man’s way to make such curt statements and then walk abruptly away, leaving one to ponder his succinctness for subtle ironies and recondite meanings. On this day, though, he stopped after two hurried steps, turned, and said, “Pity these guys, Ex. Believe me, they didn’t even know what they were doing and were more frightened of the whole business than the Counselor. I doubt there was one guy involved who thought that the Counselor would get any more than a sixty-day suspension.” “They thought wrong,” I said. We laughed. “Had the Counselor been an out-of-town boy practicing here,” he said, “he would have got off with a slap on the wrist. Believe me, subconsciously or otherwise, and aside from the issues, those Appellate justices must have believed that being one of our own the Counselor was some intractable prick so that we couldn’t handle it, chastisement and all, right here at home where it damn well should have been handled.” And here, thinking of something, he laughed heartily. “The worst of it is,” he said, “instead of being embarrassed, these goofy bastards have found out how easy a disbarment is and half the names on the bar association are popping up before the grievance committee. They’ve gone power-loony!” He laughed again, placed his forefinger against his temple and made a bang, bang.

  That any more could be said on the matter was unlikely, and my persistence in bringing it up was pure churlishness. The last time I did so I was seated in a booth drinking beer with a lawyer whom my mother as a teen-ager had wheeled in his carriage. I was raving loudly, and the lawyer, suddenly interrupting, told me to shut up about it. “Why shut up?” I said, surprised at his abruptness. “Because,” he said, “the statute of limitations on the felonious forgery you committed is a long way from expiring.” Dumfounded, I said, “You don’t think they’d be foolish enough to bring my part in this before a grand jury?” “Why not?” he said. “Well,” I snapped, “for the obvious reason that I gained nothing from the check’s being cashed. Nor for that matter did the Counselor. Never once during all of this was there a suggestion on anybody’s part that the Counselor was attempting to divert funds to his own use. It was all rather like bringing a Hausfrau before a grand jury for endorsing her husband’s-pay check.” “You still committed forgery,” the lawyer assured me blandly. Very steadily I stared at him for many moments, then I said, “Why, you fucking chicken-shit son of a bitch: I suppose you’re embarrassed even sitting with me!” Then I rose and, flatulent with rage, fled out of the barroom. I did so because it had suddenly occurred to me that my home town would have disbarred me from something if it could, preferably the human race.

  One mid-August day at the farm the wind came out of the north, and such is the character of the country here that in on the wind came both the chill and the odor of autumn. When these harbingers of fall signaled my imminent departure, I became very distraught because I knew that where other men look home with longing and affection, I would look home with loathing and rage, and that that loathing would bind me to home as fiercely as ever love does. More sobering, on leaving I would be once more “on the move,” be a part of the bewildering and stultifying movement that America has become; and the curse of movement is that during it one is never doing one’s own work but that of the world. I yearned for something essentially Miltonian or Emersonian, and something so apparently little understood today that it makes me feel antiquated and musty to mention it: I wanted to await my call. To where that call would summon me I didn’t know, but I thought that in a certain pretty milieu, under the right stars or in some clapboarded, sunny, forever verdant New England hamlet, I might yet discover myself a teacher. Unexpectedly, and at what luckily was my last possible decision-making moment, I was offered a contract to teach at one of the resort towns that lies along the St. Lawrence and whose economy is greatly bolstered by the summer people who come to gaze at the wonder of our islands. I accepted gratefully, feeling that given a year’s time I might come to a kind of peace with home. Were I forced finally to flee, I didn’t want the memory of that disbarment tying me so despondently to place.

  The principal was in his third and final year. He wasn’t —I didn’t know the reason, nor did I bother to ask—to be given another contract or tenure and would not be there come another autumn. Whatever the school’s grading policy, under the circumstances he hadn�
�t the authority to enforce it, and I set a standard that though rigid seemed fair. During the year the principal and I met a dozen or so times in the corridors, two solitary figures smiling discreetly and nodding abstractedly at one another. Once I caught him picking his nose, he caught me twice, and this put me one gaucherie up on him. By the sophomores I was asked to be class adviser, an invitation which gave me an unwarrantable pride: tenure teachers shunned such activities. As adviser, my overruling task was supervising the class’s attempts to raise money which, on the students’ arrival as seniors, would be used—oh, joy!—for a trip to New York City. The outing, I gathered, was to be a kind of initiation into the bewilderment of adulthood; and I had visions of leading my charges through a sunlit Sheridan Square and of pointing at the grotesque apartment house. Prefacing my re mark with a sigh, I imagined saying, “There used to be a little bar there—a long time ago.” We crossed the Rubicon with a “slave” dance. In a first-period assembly, members of the class were sold at auction, after which they were used by the buyer to carry his books to and from class, that kind of thing. Pretty girls, football players, and the class dunderheads, in that order, brought in the most money. Between the auction and the evening dance we earned a hundred and fifty dollars, an amount my “sponsor” teacher informed me was surprisingly high for such a function. I beamed modestly.