A Fan's Notes (11 page)

It had only just begun. The game was no sooner under way when father, in an egregiously cultivated, theatrically virile voice, began—to my profound horror—commenting on each and every play.
“
That is a delayed buck, a play which requires superb blocking and marvelous timing,
”
or,
“
That, children, is a screen pass, a fantastically perilous play to attempt, and one, I might add, that you won
’
t see Mr. Conerly attempt but once or twice a season
”
—to all of which the mother, the daughter, and the son invariably and in perfect unison exclaimed,
“
Really!
”
A tribute to father
’
s brilliance that, to my further and almost numbing horror, I, too, soon discovered I was expected to pay—pay, I would expect, for the unutterable enchantment of sitting with them. Each time that I heard the
Really
! I would become aware of a great shock of auburn hair leaning past father
’
s shoulder, and I would look up to be confronted by a brilliant conglomeration of snub noses, orange freckles, and sparkling teeth, all formed into a face of beseechment, an invitation to join in this tribute to Genius. I delayed accepting the invitation as long as I could; when the looks went from beseechment to mild reproachment, I surrendered and began chiming in with
Really
.
’
At first I came in too quickly or too late, and we seemed to be echoing each other:
Really! Really!
Though this rhythmical ineptness chafed me greatly, it brought from the family only the most understanding and kindly looks. By the end of the first quarter I had my timing down perfectly and settled down to what was the most uncomfortable afternoon of my life.

This was a superb Detroit team. It was the Detroit of a young Bobby Layne and an incomparable Doak Walker, of a monstrously bull-like Leon Harte and a three-hundred-and-thirty-pound Les Bingaman, a team that was expected to move past the Giants with ease and into the championship of the Western Division. Had they done so—which at first they appeared to be doing, picking up two touchdowns before the crowd was scarcely settled—I might have been rather amused at the constraints placed on me by the character of my hosts. But at one thrilling moment, a moment almost palpable in its intensity, and unquestionably motivated by the knowledge of Owen
’
s parting, the Giants recovered, engaged this magnificent football team, and began to play as if they meant to win. Other than the terrible fury of it, I don
’
t remember the details of the game, save that Gifford played superbly; and that at one precise moment, watching him execute one of his plays, I was suddenly and overwhelmingly struck with the urge to cheer, to jump up and down and pummel people on the back.

But then, there was father. What can I say of him? To anything resembling a good play, he would single out the player responsible and say,
“
Fine show, Gifford!
”
or
“
Wonderful stuff there, Price!
”
and we would chime in with
“
Good show!
”
and
“
Fine stuff!
”
Then, in a preposterous parody of cultured equanimity, we would be permitted to clap our gloved right hands against our left wrists, like opera-goers, making about as much noise as an argument between mutes. It was very depressing. I hadn
’
t cheered for anything or anybody in three years—since my rejection by the leggy girl—and had even mistakenly come to believe that my new-found restraint was a kind of maturity. Oh, I had had my enthusiasms, but they were dark, the adoration of the griefs and morbidities men commit to paper in the name of literature, the homage I had paid the whole sickly aristocracy of letters. But a man can dwell too long with grief, and now, quite suddenly, quite wonderfully, I wanted to cheer again, to break forth from darkness into light, to stand up in that sparsely filled (it was a typically ungrateful New York that had come to bid Owen farewell), murderously damp, bitingly cold stadium and scream my head off.

But then, here again was father—not only father but the terrible diffidence I felt in the presence of that family, in the overwhelming and shameless pride they took in each other
’
s being and good form. The game moved for me at a snail
’
s pace. Frequently I rose on tiptoe, ready to burst forth, at the last moment restraining myself. As the fury of the game reached an almost audible character, the crowd about me reacted proportionately by going stark raving mad while I stood still, saying Really! and filling up two handkerchiefs with a phlegm induced by the afternoon
’
s increasing dampness. What upset me more than anything about father was that he had no loyalty other than to The Game itself, praising players, whether Giants or Lions, indiscriminately. On the more famous players he bestowed a Mister, saying,
“
Oh, fine stuff, Mr. Layne!
”
or,
“
Wonderful show, Mr. Walker!
”
—coming down hard on the Mister the way those creeps affected by The Theater say Sir Laurence Olivier or Miss Helen Hayes. We continued our fine show
’
s and good stuff
’
s till I thought my heart would break.

Finally I did of course snap. Late in the final period, with the Giants losing by less than a touchdown, Conerly connected with a short pass to Gifford, and I thought the latter was going into the end zone. Unable to help myself, the long afternoon
’
s repressed and joyous tears welling up in my eyes, I went berserk.

Jumping up and down and pummeling father furiously on the back, I screamed,
“
Oh, Jesus, Frank! Oh, Frank, baby! Go! For Steve! For Steve! For Steve!
”

Gifford did not go all the way. He went to the one-foot line. Because it was not enough yardage for a first down, it became fourth and inches to go for a touchdown and a victory, the next few seconds proving the most agonizingly apprehensive of my life. It was an agony not allayed by my hosts. When I looked up through tear-bedewed eyes, father was straightening his camel
’
s-hair topcoat, and the face of his loved ones had been transfigured. I had violated their high canons of good taste, their faces had moved from a vision of charming wholesomeness to one of intransigent hostility; it was now eminently clear to them that their invitation to me had been a dreadful mistake.

In an attempt to apologize, I smiled weakly and said,
“
I
’
m sorry—I thought Mr. Gifford was going all the way,
”
coming down particularly hard on the Mister. But this was even more disastrous: Gifford was new to the Giants then, and father had not as yet bestowed that title on him. The total face they presented to me made me want to cut my jugular. Then, I thought, what the hell; and because I absolutely refused to let them spoil the moment for me, I said something that had the exact effect I intended: putting them in a state of numbing senselessness.

I said, my voice distinctly irritable,
“
Aw, c
’
mon, you goofies. Cheer. This is for Steve Owen! For Steve Owen!
”

The Giants did not score, and as a result did not win the game. Gifford carried on the last play, as I never doubted that he would. Wasn
’
t this game being played out just as, in my loneliness, I had imagined it would be? Les Bingaman put his three hundred and thirty pounds in Gifford
’
s way, stopping him so close to the goal that the officials were for many moments undetermined; and the Lions, having finally taken over the ball, were a good way up the field, playing ball control and running out the clock, before my mind accepted the evidence of my eyes. When it did so, I began to cough, coughing great globs into my hands. I was coughing only a very few moments before it occurred to me that I was also weeping. It was a fact that occurred to father simultaneously. For the first time since I had spoken so harshly to him, he rallied, my tears being in unsurpassably bad taste, and said,
“
Look here, it
’
s only a game.
”

Trying to speak softly so the children wouldn
’
t hear, I said,
“
Fuck you
!
”

But they heard. By now I had turned and started up the steep concrete steps; all the way up them I could hear mother and the children, still in perfect unison, screeching
Father
! and father, in the most preposterously modulated hysteria, screeching
Officer
! I had to laugh then, laugh so hard that I almost doubled up on the concrete steps. My irritation had nothing to do with these dead people, and not really—I know now—anything to do with the outcome of the game. I had begun to be haunted again by that which had haunted me on my first trip to the city—the inability of a man to impose his dreams, his ego, upon the city, and for many long months had been experiencing a rage induced by New York
’
s stony refusal to esteem me. It was foolish and childish of me to impose that rage on these people, though not as foolish, I expect, as father
’
s thinking he could protect his children from life
’
s bitterness by calling for a policeman.

Frank Gifford went on to realize a fame in New York that only a visionary would have dared hope for: he became unavoidable, part of the city
’
s hard mentality. I would never envy or begrudge him that fame. I did, in fact, become perhaps his most enthusiastic fan. No doubt he came to represent to me the realization of life
’
s large promises. But that is another part of this story. It was Owen who over the years kept bringing me back to life
’
s hard fact of famelessness. It was for this reason, as much as any other, that I had wanted to make the trip to Oneida to make my remembrances. After that day at the Polo Grounds I heard of Owen from time to time, that he was a line coach for one NFL team or another, that he was coaching somewhere in Canada—perhaps at Winnipeg or Saskatchewan. Wherever, it must have seemed to him the sunless, the glacial side of the moon. Owen unquestionably came to see the irony of his fate. His offensively obsessed detractors had been rendered petulant by his attitude that
“
football is a game played down in the dirt, and always will be,
”
and within three years after his leaving, his successors, having inherited his ideas (the umbrella pass-defense for one), took the Giants to a world championship with little other than a defense. It was one of the greatest defenses (Robustelli, Patton, Huff, Svare, Livingston, et al.) that the game has ever seen, but, for all of that, a championship won by men who played the game where Owen had tenaciously and fatally maintained it was played—
in the dirt.

After that day at the Polo Grounds, I went the way I must go, a little sluggardly, smiling a smile that mocked myself. If I went wrong, it was because, like Tonio Kroger, there was for me no right way. I lived in many cities—Chicago, Los Angeles, Colorado Springs, Baltimore, Miami—and with each new milieu my jobs grew less remunerative, my dreams more absurdly colored. To sustain them I found that it took increasing and ever-increasing amounts of alcohol. After a time I perceived that I was continually contemplating the world through the bubbling, cerise hue of a wine glass. Awaking one morning in a jail cell in Miami, I was led before a judge on a charge of public intoxication and vagrancy, given a suspended sentence of thirty days on the county farm, told by the judge I was a fatuous lunatic, and ordered to be out of the city of Miami within the hour. I came home then, back to Watertown, and by the autumn of 1958, a brief five years from the autumn I had stood in the Polo Grounds, I was in the Avalon Valley State Hospital for the mentally insane and not particularly interested in the reasons that had brought me there.

3/
Straw Hat for a Madman

The Reception Building of the Avalon Valley State Hospital for the mentally insane lies high up on the eastern slope of the valley. A new patient is placed for orientation on its topmost or third floor. By bringing his face up close to the window—so that the bars begin to blur, then closer till those imposing reminders of lost freedom disappear altogether from view—he can look down the hill and see the entire hospital spread out below him. From that point—though for a time one is conscious of the cold, somber, and unyielding bars on one
’
s cheeks—the place looks not unlike an Eastern university where anxious parents send their apple-cheeked sons and daughters to discover man
’
s heritage.

In the fall—although I was there twice, in all seasons, it is in the autumn that I best remember it, for it was in that fanciful season that first I saw the place—a mist hung silently in the valley. The trees were all shot then with wine-reds, brilliant golds, and breath-taking lemons; even the sidewalks, bordered by the neat-trimmed lawns that swept down from the three-story, red-brick buildings, and crowded with easy-promenading patients, seemed, from that comforting distance, to be conveying chattering, eager students to their
“
Psych 202
”
class.