A Fan's Notes

1 / The Nervous Light of Sunday

On Sunday, the eleventh of November, 196–, while sitting at the bar of the New Parrot Restaurant in my home town, Watertown, New York, awaiting the telecast of the New York Giants–Dallas Cowboys football game, I had what, at the time, I took to be a heart attack.

It wasn
’
t. It—the
“
seizure
”
or whatever one chooses to call it—was brought on by the high and delicious anxiety I always experienced just prior to a Giants game, and by a weekend of foodless, nearly heroic drinking. For me it was a common enough drinking; but the amounts consumed had been intensified by the news, received by mail from Scarsdale two days before, that my wife intended to divorce me and to have custody of my two-year-old twin sons. It gives me feeble comfort to report it was not a heart attack. The pain was excruciatingly vivid, and for many moments I was terrified by the fear of death. Illogically, this was one terror I believed I had long since cast off—having cast it off, I thought, with the effortless lunacy of a man putting a shotgun into his mouth and ridding himself of the back of his skull. That the fear of death still owns me is, in its way, a beginning.

Each weekend I traveled the fifty-odd miles from Glacial Falls to Watertown, where I spent Friday night and all day Saturday in some sustained whisky drinking, tapering off Sundays with a few bottles of beer at The Parrot, eyes fixed on the television screen, cheering for my team.
Cheering
is a paltry description. The Giants were my delight, my folly, my anodyne, my intellectual stimulation. With Huff I
“
stunted
”
up and down the room among the bar stools, preparing to
“
shoot the gap
”
; with Shofner I faked two defenders
“
out of their cleats,
”
took high, swimming passes over my right shoulder and trotted, dipsy-doodle-lie, into the end zone; with Robustelli I swept into backfields and with cruel disdain flung flat-footed, helpless quarterbacks to the turf. All this I did amidst an unceasing, pedantic commentary I issued on the character of the game, a commentary issued with the patronizing air of one who assumed those other patrons incapable of assessing what was taking place before their eyes. Never did I stop moving or talking. Certainly I drove a good many customers away. Most of those who remained had seen the show before and had come back for more, bringing with them the morbid fascination which compels one to stare at a madman.

For the Giants they were exhilarating and lovely afternoons. With Y. A. Tittle passing to Shofner, Webster, Gifford, and Walton, the team was displaying its most adroit and exciting offense in memory; I was giddy with admiration. Despite those few felicitous hours, the weekends were tedious and could as well have taken place at Glacial Falls had I not been earning my drinking money at what my colleagues, with disarming somberness, referred to as
“
teaching school.
”
It wasn
’
t that teachers weren
’
t permitted to drink in Glacial Falls, or that anyone would have frowned on a teacher
’
s cheering in a local saloon. My case was somewhat different. Prior to his offering me a contract, Mr. A., the superintendent, had told me, half apologetically, half menacingly, that he understood I drank heavily. I should have said,
“
Well, friend, if you
understand
that, you
’
d best not expose me to and run the risk of my polluting the kids
”
; but I badly needed the job and so found myself in the humiliating position of having to assure the man I
’
d refrain from
“
excessiveness
”
around Glacial Falls, a rural community of ten thousand, buried half the year under leaden skies and heavy snows, and all the year under the weight of its large and intransigent ignorance.

“
The children come first,
”
Mr. A. said to me at the time.
“
You understand that. We have to protect the children at all costs.
”

He said this sincerely, and I had no reason to doubt him. I wanted to believe him. For me it was another autumn, a time of new beginnings, and I was thirty-two; but I had only to teach a few days to realize the children came anything but first. The curriculum was, as it had been in the two schools where I had substituted, as bland as hominy grits; and there was a faculty that might most kindly be referred to as not altogether cretinous. A freshman had nuns cloistered in a
“
Beanery,
”
a sophomore thought the characters in
Julius Caesar
talked
“
pretty damn uppity for a bunch of Wops,
”
a junior defined
“
in mufti
”
as the attire worn by
“
some kind of sexual freak (like a certain ape who sits a few seats from me!),
”
and a senior considered
“
Hamlet a fag if I ever saw one. I mean, yak, yak, yak, instead of sticking that Claude in the gizzard, that Claude who
’
s doing all those smelly things to his Mom.
”

Compounding the touching bewilderment of these students was an English department chairman who clung to such syntactical myths as that either
different from
or
different than
are permissible as the former is used in America and the latter in England. Though I had done some substitute work, this was my first contractual obligation, I was bringing to it a typically asinine and enthusiastic aplomb, and at this point I sought the floor.
“
I
’
ve heard this for years,
”
I said,
“
have always looked for it, and have found that most English writers use
different from
. Without a Fowler handy I haven
’
t the foggiest how this argument got started, but I suspect that some prose writer of Dean Swiftian eminence got smashed one day, inadvertently substituted
than
for
from
, and for the past two hundred years the dons at Oxford and Cambridge have been scratching their heads and picking their noses over it. But this professorial bickering has nothing to do with us. Between getting smashed and cracking up their hot rods, initiating each other into their sex clubs, and having their rumbles, these little dears are looking to us for direction
”
—a loud laugh here from the back of the room, issuing from a Dartmouth man who taught English and Latin—
”
and we ought to give it to them. Oughtn
’
t we to take a hard and arbitrary line and say it
’
s
different from
, period? Certainly they
’
ll come to us and show us how Hemingway strings together ten compound sentences without employing a single comma, but we
’
ll just have to tell them they
ain
’
t
Hemingway. I doubt there
’
s anything stifling to creativity here. If any of these kids are going to write, they
’
ll write in spite of us, and at least they
’
ll know what rules they
’
re violating.
”

This tastelessly long-winded monologue occurred at the first department meeting in September. Thinking that the laughter of the Dartmouth man had reflected the sentiments of my colleagues, when I finished, feeling rather proud, I looked round to see how the rest of the English teachers were reacting to the witty and brilliant new addition to their staff. To a man they were glum, somewhat wretched. Immediately after the meeting I discovered why. Approached by a broad-assed, martini-swilling, brazen, and theatrical old termagant, I was informed as a teacher new to the system that one did not enter discussions at department meetings, that
“
talking took time,
”
and that there were all sorts of places one would rather be.
“
I
’
m sorry,
”
I said.
“
I thought these meetings were for a purpose.
”

As the year progressed I learned that due to this conspiracy of silence the department chairman was forced to carry single-handedly what were supposed to be give-and-take discussions. Knowing he was no more ignorant than those boobs seated around me patronizing him, I felt sorry for him. At the beginning of each meeting he handed to his English teachers mimeographed sheets containing lettered items,
A, B, C, D, E
, reflecting the wisdom of thirty years spent in combat with the language. Unsure of our ability to read (our ability to talk hadn
’
t encouraged him), he read each and every item to us. Beginning with a lovingly theatrical enunciation of
A
, he thereupon was off. Matchlessly vapid, the items were such that I remember only one of them, and that only because to this day I have no notion of what he meant by it:
The best place to make out your lesson plans is at your desk
. In fairness to the man, he did not feel duty-bound to the continuity of his mimeographed sheets and often interrupted his readings to impart to us some newly acquired gem. One day he told us he had come across the word
apostasy
but hadn
’
t bothered to look it up as he had no fear of encountering it again. He was implying that if an English teacher looked up every unknown word he came across, he
’
d spend half his waking hours poring myopically over the dictionary. Smiling, he then permitted us to nod our heads in acquiescence to his canniness. He beamed. Then he did something unforgivable. Having admitted to not comprehending a word known to most high school seniors, he suddenly chose to group his teachers within the limits of his own scant vision.
“
Do any of you know the meaning of the word?
”
he challenged. The silence was awesome. Everyone stared at the floor. I don
’
t know why I chose to speak. It would be the last time I ever did so at a meeting. I defined the word, trying to speak in a matter-of-fact, self-disparaging way, as though I were admitting that nobody but a fool or a freak would know the meaning of such an esoteric word.
“
Apostasy,
”
I said,
“
is the disavowal of previously avowed principles.
”
And, oh lord, my impatient, querulous, pompous voice too clearly reflected the long weeks of my anguish at these sessions. Led by the theatrical
grande dame
, all heads cranked round to peer in utter astonishment and loathing at me, loathing not only for having committed the gaffe of entering a discussion but for suggesting that the world wasn
’
t, after all, bordered by the town signs proclaiming Glacial Falls.