A Fan's Notes (20 page)

Invariably I arrived there between eight and nine, squeezed my way among the blue blazers at the bar, ordered a fifteen-cent beer, and fixed on my face the smile of a man with implicit faith in the future. That smile was a positive receptacle for life
’
s possibilities. I did not want to miss, as I had with Cary Grant, a second chance to enter the future. When the gentle-voiced, intellectual man from the publishing house told me to get my
“
notes in shape
”
so that he could
“
look them over,
”
I wanted to be ready; when the Vassar blonde, rendered wobbly-kneed in the face of my benign charm, spurned her date and beckoned for me to follow, I wanted to be at her elegant, pump-sheathed insteps, panting. I never doubted that at any moment such a thing would happen, that a mysterious stranger would remark my
“
good looks
”
and
“
high intelligence
”
and in only a matter of hours I would be winging my way to Bonn or Lisbon or Johannesburg on a mission of grave and singular importance. I never talked with anyone save a young bartender, and no one ever talked with me. Yet for one so guileless I frequently found myself in some unnerving quandaries, having to restrain myself from bursting into anger. My trouble was my sanguine, ingenuous, and lunatic smile. Other men took it to be a piece of foppish coquetry, as if I were proposing to them English public school games; often I heard men in my vicinity make nasty observations about me, speaking with that hateful anxiety that signaled their fear of their own manhood. I had no idea what the Vassar girls thought of me. I expect it was nothing more than that I was a satyr on the make; one of them involved me in a remarkably unnecessary scene one evening.

She was sitting at the street end of the bar with her back to
Third Avenue, flapping her shoulder-length blond hair about in a somewhat affected though fetching way and permitting a flanneled, bespectacled undergraduate type to buy her scotch and light her Parliaments. She was extremely attractive, but like all the girls I saw at Clarke
’
s there was something a little aseptically unreal about her. At one time—for no more than a discreet moment or two—I had definitely been giving her the compliment of my stares, but I was now looking through her as through a glassless window frame, looking out at Third Avenue trying to see the Nile. Apparently her vanity wouldn
’
t admit the possibility. Quite suddenly I felt an irritated finger prodding me quite significantly in the elbow and looked up to find the undergraduate in what he assumed to be a posture of indignation.
“
Stop staring at my date,
”
he snapped.

I did not like his tone.
“
I wasn
’
t staring at your date,
”
I said. I maintained my smile.

Don
’
t give me that!
”
he said.
“
You
’
ve been staring at her for the last half-hour!
”

He was beginning to raise his voice, and I felt the blood go to the back of my neck, imagining all those sleek necks behind me cranking around in their button-down collars. Now the bartender was involved in it. He whispered to the man something to the effect that I was okay—just a bit
“
weird.
”
This apologetic tone infuriated me, and it was all Specs needed: he took it as license to become more indignant and began pounding his fleshless hand on the bar and screaming he wouldn
’
t have it! While he was doing this, I suddenly grew bored with him and, spurred on by the bartender
’
s patronizing me, really did start staring lasciviously at his date, ogling her and making tentative but definitely lewd suggestions with my tongue. Miss Vassar went into one of those swoons Victorian women were given to, letting her beautiful blue eyes roll up into her head and, her hands clawing the bar, hurled herself back into an imaginary divan.

My mother has an aging cocker spaniel, Christie III, whose bladder can
’
t be stayed, and whenever the poor dog has to take a piss, he stands by the door whining something fierce and going into an incredibly pathetic jig. That
’
s what Specs seemed in need of—bladder relief. I watched him for a few seconds, smiling, then reached out, took his inflamed cheeks between my thumbs and forefingers, squeezed till they went white as alabaster, bent to him, planted an enthusiastic kiss on the down above the rim of his glasses, and walked out the door. A month later I ran into the bartender walking on Lexington Avenue. When he asked where I had been, I smiled weakly and said,
“
I wasn
’
t sure I was welcome.
”
He told me to forget about it, that for years he had wanted to do what I did to about 90 percent of the habitués of Clarke
’
s. The following evening I was back among the snug-shoulders, my smile a good deal more timorous.

On leaving Clarke
’
s I always walked to Fifty-third Street, took the downtown train, got off at Fourth Street in the Village, and for the next couple hours drank beer at Minetta
’
s, the Kettle of Fish, and the San Remo on Macdougal Street. By eleven I was always, night in and night out, at Louis
’
on Sheridan Square. Louis
’
was one of those walk-down bars, its floor situated a half-dozen feet below street level. It was compact and cozy, its low artificially cobwebbed ceiling rendering its murky, yellow light mysterious, enchanting with smoke. Because of the smallness of the place, it seemed to be always swarming with people, and I took its atmosphere to be the very epitome of Village life, the vibrant, incessant hum of its conversations seeming to whisper of plays, paintings, and novels just short of being realized.

I wonder now if I ever gave thought to how these things were to be accomplished drinking beer in Louis
’
. I don
’
t sup pose I did, though I knew better. At USC I had taken a course from Harlan Hatcher, who was on summer sabbatical from the University of Illinois just prior to assuming the presidency of the University of Michigan. He was a little wistful, a little surprised and perhaps dismayed by his rise in the academic hierarchy. He, too, had wanted
“
to write
”
when young; and if I took anything from his course, it was an observation he had made on Hemingway in Paris during the twenties. He said that while he and others tried to talk their novels out in sidewalk cafes, Hemingway was locked up in a room getting on with the business of his life, that though he did not know Hemingway, he knew of him, as all the young Americans in Paris did, and that Hemingway proved a constant provocation to them, like a furious clarion that books do not get written on the Montparnasse. I suppose I must have been aware that there were even then, out above me in the Village night, young men and women seeking to commit to paper or to canvas their all-consuming visions of America; occasionally I noticed at the bar a more provoking silhouette, a man whose isolated intensity suggested that he was even then phrasing in his mind darkly beautiful paragraphs. But I did not let these things provoke me, and went blissfully on my way, thinking of Boswell
’
s description of Johnson at work on one of his books. Remembering how the good doctor, having fallen heir to melancholia halfway through the manuscript and unable to write, had sent for the publisher and had dictated the remainder of the work while he lay abed (the beauty of Boswell
’
s humanity was that he never saw the humor of this), I saw myself lolling on a sateen divan, spitting grape seeds like Spencer Tracy
’
s Mr. Hyde, and dictating my immortal words to my Vassar blonde, taking five minutes out now and then for an orgy. In Louis
’
in those days, one could believe in anything.

The patrons of Louis
’
did not like each other very much. It is only now that I can see that we represented to one another wasted time and crippling dreams. Because of this we did not contain our tempers or our insults, and after a time I seldom talked with anyone save the bartenders, Mike and Red. Unable to communicate, we stood together at the bar caught up each in his own vision of the future, quite unwilling to respect each other
’
s dreams.

The only man I liked in Louis
’
I never got to know, the cinema star Steve McQueen. I only spoke to him once or twice. Even then he was quite unapproachable, as if he were already the man he would one day become; and the one time that I definitely remember having words with him, they were about a girl for whom we both had eyes, and the words were childish and petulant, involving as they did a good deal of sizing each other up. But I still have a very clear picture of him as he was then; in a way he seemed to represent all of us, at that time, in that place. Wearing the snug cap affected by sports-car enthusiasts, a cap that seemed to sit precariously atop his thick blond hair, a heavy green wool sweater, and corduroy trousers, he used to stand by the hour hunched over the bar, staring broodingly off into space. He had a casualness about him that suggested the indifferent aristocracy; but on closer inspection, there proved to be a very real hardness about him, the hardness of a gutter fighter, and one suspected that he hadn
’
t been corrupted by any pretentions he had picked up in a Yale
“
classics
”
course. There was an incredible hunger about him, as if he stood poised to devour the universe, and though I did not know what his particular dream was, I was sure that of all the
habitués
of Louis
’
it was he who would make it. A few years later (and which madhouse was I in then?) I turned on the television and saw him in a cowboy suit pumping furiously away with some kind of sawed-off rifle, and a few years later opened Life and found that he was the hottest thing in Hollywood since John Wayne. Studying the photos, I wasn
’
t surprised to notice that he seemed not the least surprised at finding himself a King. In those days we all stood at the bar poised on the threshold of some rhapsodic destiny. Frank Gifford, more than any single person, sustained for me the illusion that fame was possible.

In the year I spent in New York, I became a fan. I became hooked. I didn
’
t intend it that way, or, for that matter, didn
’
t comprehend it when it did happen. But happen it did; it was in those days that Sundays began to take on for me a frantic and nervous exhilaration. I would purchase all the Sunday newspapers, drop those sections I didn
’
t read into the gutter along the way, then take my Sunday breakfast at a diner on Third Avenue. It was not a clean place, but the food was cheap and edible and abundant, mountains of scrambled eggs and thick-cut bacon and home-fried potatoes and great mugs of fresh coffee (the place is gone now, given way to a pastel lemon and orange Hot Shoppe). After breakfast I used to go back to my iron cot at the Y, reread the articles about the Giants over and over again, and plan my strategy. Steve Owen was gone, and the new coach, Jim Lee Howell, wasn
’
t
“
showing
”
me very much. About noon I would rise and head for the Polo Grounds.

The crowds at the Polo Grounds were nothing whatever like the crowds one sees in Yankee Stadium today. The sportswriters hadn
’
t as yet convinced the public that something very special was taking place on autumn Sunday afternoons, something that in its execution was at times beautiful, at times almost awesome, at times almost art. The writers were beginning to clamor, but the tone of most sportswriting is a clamor, making it difficult for the fan to isolate the real from the fantastic. Still, these writers are a tough breed to tune out, the public would eventually listen, and in a few seasons the Giants would have moved to the Yankee Stadium, would have changed their jerseys from a crimson to a formal navy blue, would have added to their helmets a snooty N.Y. emblem, and would be playing, week in and week out, to sell-out crowds of Chesterfield-coated corporation executives and their elegant legged, mink-draped wives. The Polo Grounds was never sold out.

Arriving at the field shortly before one, I would buy a bleacher seat for a buck, then for another dollar bribe my way into a seat between the forty-yard lines. With the wind at my back I had to stand at the back of the stadium during the first part of the game until the usher, having decided what seats were going to go unoccupied throughout the afternoon (usually near the end of the first period), steered me to an empty. Waiting, I always stood with a group of men from Brooklyn who also paid the bribe. An Italian bread-truck driver, an Irish patrolman, a fat garage mechanic, two or three burly longshoremen, and some others whose occupations I forget—we were a motley, a memorable picture. Dressed as often as not in skimpy jackets, without gloves, we were never dressed warmly enough. Our noses ran. To keep warm we smoked one cigarette after another, drank much beer, and jogged up and down on the concrete. The Brooklyn guys talked all during the game, as much as Brooklyn guys ever talk, which is to say hardly at all. Brooklyn guys issue statements. There is a unity of tone that forbids disagreement.
“
Take duh fucking bum ou
tta de
a
h
!
”
or
“
Dat guy is a pro
”
—that designation being the highest accolade they allowed a player for making some superb play. Hollow-chested, their frigid hands stuffed deep into their pockets, their eyes and noses running, they looked about as fit to judge the relative merits of athletes as Ronald Firbank. Still, because of the cocksure, irrefutable tones in which they issued their judgments, I was certain they knew everything about football, and I enjoyed being with them immensely.