A Fan's Notes (17 page)

It was all for naught. We knew it, and from that day on we did the only thing we could think of to do. We jeered Paddy. We mimicked the girlish way he held the paddle. -Look at
meeeh
—
”
in a li
sp—
”
I
’
m Katherine O
’
Hara O
’
Sul
livan O
’
Day, and I
’
m just too
presheeous
for words!
”
Now the man would proceed around the table, wispily swinging his hips in what he imagined to be a feminine way. Frightful little hissing noises continued to issue from our throats. We decided that Paddy
’
s serve was illegal. He changed it. We even decided that he cheated—how, we didn
’
t articulate.
“
If we ever catch you,
”
we cautioned him, our voices tense with menace. Throughout all this Paddy continued to stand ramrod straight, playing his game, occasionally smiling at one or another of our more outlandish threats. When the smiles became frequent, when our threats, that is, became more numerous, I began to grow uneasy, sensing something very like hysteria setting in.

In the first days Paddy had held the paddle, we had spent our evenings huddled together in the ward, discussing the best way to beat him. But as the days passed and the futility of our desires became increasingly evident, these meetings had turned from strategy discussions to some more hopeful and concrete ways we could inflict humiliation on Paddy. They began in innocent wickedness. Someone wanted to urinate on his toothbrush. Someone else wanted to duck his head in the toilet bowl. But they began to get increasingly creative.
“
I got it!
”
one of our number suggested one night.
“
We
’
ll wait till about two in the morning, see. Then we
’
ll grab one of the fags by his scrawny neck, see. Then we
’
ll set him gently on Paddy
’
s chest. Got the picture?
”
Here the man
’
s eyes ran quite lewdly wild with the creativity of his vision. We all nodded impatiently, our mouths open.
“
And then—ho, ho, ho—
”
and here the man got down on his knees on the floor assuming the fag
’
s position on Paddy
’
s imaginary chest.
“
And then what?
”
someone squealed in anticipation.
“
And then—for Christ
’
s sake, what else? We
’
ll make the fag stick his dinker into Paddy
’
s jaw!
”
One would have thought we had been trapped in a cave for nine days, and the man had just come up with a brilliant i
dea for breaking us out.
“
Yeah!
Yeah! Yeah!
”
everyone screamed in unison.
“
No! No! No!
”
I bellowed in protest.

My closest acquaintance at Avalon Valley was a brilliant, tobacco-chawing, cynical and acrid Italian man from Staten Island. He was twenty-six, his hair was completely white, and
he looked fifty-six. He used the word
fuck
with a frequency I have never heard in a world quite
given over to crassness. We
called him Snow White. Without removing his hands from his a pockets or sliding up in his chair, and prefacing his sour remarks by expectorating a great glob of tobacco juice on the floor (he always maintained, an evil smile on his lips, that it - didn
’
t make any difference because the juice and the floor were the same color), he said,
“
Fuck, no! That fucking bastard would bite the poor fucking bugger
’
s dinker right off at its fucking stump!
”
Surprisingly, most of these suggestions were made to me. Against my will and for reasons I didn
’
t understand, I had become a kind of leader and had only to nod my head to get Paddy his long-deserved comeuppance. But I remained cautious, trying to think of something a little more subtle, something that would not cost any of us any more time than we were already destined to spend in the hospital. By the time the above suggestion was made, though, the men were tiring of me; and it was really Snow White
’
s protest that saved Paddy that day. I went to bed that night knowing that the men were on the verge of acting on their own.

The next day Paddy, as arbitrarily as he had snatched up the paddle—on the ninth day, after four or five games—permitted me (I was sure of it) to beat him in a close game, laid down the paddle, left the Recreation Room, and we never saw him there again. A loner, he had known exactly how to gauge the hostility of the crowd, precisely the moment to go out the door.

The men were furious.
“
Did he let you do that?
”
they screamed at me.

“
No, for Christ
’
s sake!
”
I bellowed back at them.

Whether they believed me or not, they let it go, sank into sullenness, and Paddy
’
s ass had been saved once again.

Only once did I have anything resembling a conversation with Paddy the Duke, and this did not take place until some weeks later, on the night before he left the hospital, though at the time I talked with him I didn
’
t know he was leaving the next day. For a number of weeks I lost all interest in Paddy and even succeeded in almost totally obliterating my milieu. My weeks became a long slumber below which I was always conscious that when I awoke it would be to the discomfiting thought of my imminent departure from the hospital. Dr. K. had decided that my illness did not warrant confinement (he expressed distinct alarm, then quickly covered himself to protect his medical brethren, on learning that I had been given shock treatment). It was true that I had violated many of the customs and prejudices of society; but his solution, though I knew it to be precisely to the point, was not so easy to execute: he told me to stop thinking of myself so much, that my disease was the
“
bosom serpent,
”
egotism.
“
You
’
ll be going soon,
”
he said to me one day. Because I expressed neither joy nor alarm, he did not mention it again for a number of weeks.

During these weeks the only time I was conscious of Paddy was at the Wednesday evening meetings of the Avalon Valley Chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, to which all patients whose trouble was compounded by booze, or whose trouble had become booze (there is a difference), were required to go. I always took a table with two skeptics; we called it
“
Cynics
’
Circle.
”
Snow White was, of course, one of the men. He wasn
’
t an alcoholic; his problem was that he was tired, and he came to these meetings for laughs. The other man was Bronislaw. He was about forty-five. He had blue eyes, a wonderfully virile face with very pronounced features, a fine crop of thick, graying hair, and he chain-smo
ked perfectly formed cigarettes
that he rolled himself. By his own admission (and without our even inquiring) he was Very Big in Greenwich Village. A number of short stories, he said, had been written about him; and he had also cluttered a good bit of the canvas of a novel called, I think,
Flee the Angry Strangers
. I never understood why. Though I liked him immensely, I never understood a word he said and could not comprehend how anybody could have got him on paper. His reminiscences were completely devoid of transitional thoughts, his sentences dealt only in symbolic essences, hurdling erratically from one to the next. He was as unintelligible to me as Joyce
’
s
Finnegans Wake
. He was not an alcoholic either. He had been both a dope addict (cured in Lexington) and a dope pusher, and he loved people more than any man I had ever met. To him everybody was a
“
bunny
”
that he just wanted to
“
love to death.
”
He came to the meetings for free coffee and doughnuts, and because he was trying to
“
love Snow White to death,
”
though Snow White always maintained that it was I he was after.

The three of us had a pact, governed by signals—pinching one another, agreeing to step fiercely on each other
’
s toes when we felt riotous laughter welling up within us. It was not that any of us doubted the efficacy of group therapy for alcoholics (it is probably the only treatment), but, oh, dear
heart, alcoholics in the loony bin! Their
“
falls
”
had been - from dizzying, nearly invisible heights.
“
And so I said to Churchill,
‘
Winston,
’
I said—
”
“
My daddy lose twenty-six mil- , lion in The Crash, so I never get a
etchookashun
—
”
Paddy had his own table even at these meetings. He had by then drawn his isolation about him like a mantle, and nobody, but nobody, violated it. He had a wooden clipboard, thick with lined paper, on which he furiously took down apparently
every word of every confession. This used to infuriate Snow
White; he sensed this note-taking was rendering t
he con
fessors shy, that they weren
’
t opening up the way they ordi
narily would, and that he was being deprived of some of his laughless laughs.
“
What the fuck
’
s he doin
’
with that pencil?
”
he would ask petulantly, hate in his eyes.
“
He
’
s a bunny, ain
’
t he?
”
Bronislaw would say.
“
Ignore duh fucking guy!
”
Snow White would snap, as though we had brought him up. But I couldn
’
t really ignore him, and often I found my eyes drifting to his table to watch him write right off the page, then crazily flap it over, like a timid stenographer working for a brutish, tyrannical employer. There was a definite fear of not getting it all down. Once or twice he met my gaze, and when he did so, I smiled at him, condescendingly. His blunt Irish features hardened fiercely, his black eyes protruded, but this nonsense no longer worked with me. Once I laughed aloud at him and with the fingernail of my thumb scraped against my upper teeth. Later I heard that it was the Mafiosa sign signaling to the recipient that vengeance was imminent. At the time I only meant to say,
“
You
’
re a goofy fuck—you know that?
”

November came in cold and went; and as it went I began to grow more perceptibly uneasy; I knew—or suspected—that I would be released any day, and in truth, though I daren
’
t say so to the authorities for fear of never getting out, there was in all the world no place whatever I cared to go. I spent a lot of time brooding on this phenomenon, which Paddy the Duke must have sensed. Where I had not been conscious of him for weeks except at the AA meetings, I seemed now always to be looking up out of my apprehension of the future to find him looking at me, his black eyes studying me intently, as if he understood it all implicitly and in a way that not even I did.

Sitting in the ward one night, staring at the floor, and caught up, as I say, in what had become for me a perpetual anguish of the future, I suddenly became conscious of him sitting right next to me, staring at me. In a way I was surprised: it was Paddy
’
s custom,
as I have said, immediately
after supper to go lie on his bed and study the ceiling. Knowing this habit, I now had no doubt he intended to speak to me and the longer he held his peace, the more uneasy I became. I was on the verge of moving when he spoke.

“
You
’
ll be leavin
’
soon, huh?
”

“
Maybe so,
”
I said indifferently. I meant to suggest that I didn
’
t care a bit whether the conversation continued or not.

“
You won
’
t make it.
”
Though he did not say this arrogantly, there was in his voice an alarming finality.

“
That
’
s hardly for you to determine,
”
I snapped.