A Fan's Notes (21 page)

And they liked me. I was so alien to their hard, sophisticated, and wordless enthusiasms that they—oh, grand irony! —considered me a freak! Especially because I was so partial to Gifford. Whenever, smiling, I joined their conclave, sneaking sort of shyly among them, one of them would always say,
“
Hey, boys, here
’
s duh Gippeh. How we gonna make out today, Gippeh?
”
or
“
Don
’
t stand next to me, Gippeh—my fucking back
’
s still achin
’
from last week!
”
Everyone would laugh like a goddam hyena. Me too. As the season progressed, we found we enjoyed each other so much that we decided, quite tacitly, to stand the entire game. Had we moved into the empty seats, we would have had to split up, one here, two or three there, wherever the seats were available. So we braved the wind at our backs, our noses ran, we had large laughs—that laughter haunts me still—and sometimes, at those moments when the play on the field seemed astonishingly perfect, we just fell quiet. That was the most memorable picture of all. We were Wops and Polacks and Irishmen out of Flatbush, along with one mad dreamer out of the cold, cow country up yonder, and though we may not have had the background, or the education, to weep at Prince Ham let
’
s death, we had all tried enough times to pass and kick a ball, we had on our separate rock-strewn sandlots taken enough lumps and bruises, to know that we were viewing something truly fine, something that only comes with years of toil, something very like art.

They were right about my churlish, extravagant partiality to Gifford; though I suspect they never understood it, it amused them, and they liked me for that. Already that fall I had drawn parallels between Gifford
’
s life and mine, our having been at USC together, our having come East almost simultaneously, and the unquestionable fact that we both desired fame, perhaps he even more than I, for he had already eaten, in a limited way, of that Bitch at school. Throughout that autumn, throughout those long, lovely afternoons, there was only one number for me, 16, and I cheered frantically for it, pounding my Brooklyn buddies on the back, and screaming,
“
Atta boy, Frank! Atta way,
you bastard!
”
I caught passes with him, and threw blocks with him, and groaningly sucked in my breath as he was being viciously tackled. Watching him rise after such a tackle, I piddled back to the huddle with him, my head cranked back at the recent executor of the tackle, my voice warning,
“
Next time, you bastard—
”

It was very simple really. Where I could not, with syntax, give shape to my fantasies, Gilford could, with his superb timing, his great hands, his uncanny faking, give shape to his. It was something more than this: I cheered for him with such inordinate enthusiasm, my yearning became so involved with his desire to escape life
’
s bleak anonymity, that after a time he became my alter ego, that part of me which had its being in the competitive world of men; I came, as incredible as it seems to me now, to believe that I was, in some magical way, an actual instrument of his success. Each time I heard the roar of the crowd, it roared in my ears as much for me as him; that roar was not only a promise of my fame, it was its un equivocal assurance.

He was hurt a good deal in 1954; but there were days when he was fine, and all that season I tried to get my Brooklyn friends to bestow on him the name of pro. In the very last game I saw at the Polo Grounds—for I was suddenly to be transferred by the railroad to Chicago—they did so. I don
’
t remember the play, but it was one of those incredible catches that have characterized his career; that awesome, forbidding silence had descended immediately on our group. We looked at each other pop-eyed, shaking our heads in wonder. Then we stared at the Italian truck driver, the swarthy little man who was the arbiter of our fuzzy enthusiasms. He was a very theatrical little guy. He didn
’
t say anything for a long time. Then he looked up at me and smiled apologetically, as though he were giving in.
“
He
’
s a pro,
”
he proclaimed.
“
He is a pro.
”
Then all the rest of them shook their heads knowingly and repeated,
“
He is a pro!
”
Lunatic tears brimmed my eyes and I smiled a lunatic smile from ear to ear; we all roared at my sentimentality and roughed each other affectionately with our hands, dancing round and round in the cold winds of the Polo Grounds.

“
I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style … first to knock, first admitted… .
”
Such had my buddy Augie —he who had helped me pass the endless hours locked up in my glass cubicle in New York—begun his wild and picturesque tale. And though for me Augie had never vindicated his claims of Chicago
’
s somberness, I was not in that city two weeks before I began to believe that he had not, after all, cast out the word idly. I got fired from my job. My boss called me on the telephone from New York and told me that the Texan was launched on another economy wave, which involved cutting from the Central
’
s payroll my rather meager salary. I said okay. There was nothing else I could say. On hanging up, I had lighted a cigarette and through a window had watched the wintry night descend on Chicago
’
s Loop. It was, except for the view, an imposing office on the topmost, the executive floor of LaSalle Street Station. With its picture window, its great desk, its wall-to-wall carpeting, I would hate to give it up. I had no money, and the thought of going back to my aunt
’
s davenport and beginning another assault on New York, and with it the continual and humiliating blows to one
’
s esteem (if someone had asked me at that moment why I wanted to work for HKI & W, I would have removed from my pocket a forty-five, had I a forty-five, and put a tidy little hole between his eyes), all but prostrated me. Worse than anything, I had at the lousy hotel where I was staying picked up a division or two of crab lice. Having got some stinging solution from a pharmacist—whispering through a weak smile,
“
Something for crabs, please?
”
—I thought I had rid myself of the vermin, but almost simultaneously with the news of my firing the tenacious heathens had regrouped and begun what felt like Armageddon. Rising, I strolled to the door, latched it, returned to my seat, sat, unzipped my fly, and began doing battle with both armies. A forlorn, a lugubrious, a sad, sad picture, young, suave, brilliant Freddy Exley a thousand miles from home, sans job, sans hope, sans energy, sitting high in the carpeted sky, his bulging eyes down close to his vital parts, spearing with his fingernails those filthy, those vile little curs.

A couple years later I would open the newspaper to the news that Robert R. Young, after eating a breakfast of ham and eggs, had gone upstairs to his study, had put a shotgun into his mouth, and had blown away the back of his head. I would smile. There was in that smile nothing vindictive; I had never looked on Young as a man of flesh and blood. To me he was a jaunty little thing I used to see bouncing across the upper level of the Grand Central surrounded by a platoon of snug-shoulders. I never believed in his reality. I would smile because everyone I knew at the New York Central, Sybil Radcliffe, the man who had just fired me, and others, had believed that Young was a man of precise direction, a man who would with a few unerring strokes, piggyback freight, lightweight trains, coast-to-coast passenger service, yah, yah, yah, rescue an entire industry. And I would smile sadly, a smile very close to tears: Young, with that one beautiful gesture, had come alive for me, had become a man. For suicide is the most eloquent of all wails for direction. Suicide is what Hemingway does when the world gets so out of focus he can no longer commit it to paper. Suicide is what the man does when the pain caused by the cancer in the bowel blurs the landscape to the eye so that all things look the same and even the defined direction of blackness seems welcome. Suicide—well, it was what Young did, and it was the conspicuous admission of his defeat, his inability to bring direction to that industry, a direction he had boasted he could and would bring.

The man who fired me would not even outlive Young. Coming by superliner from the company
’
s annual meeting in Albany, he had dropped his head to the back of the seat in front of his and died of a heart attack, died there among those paragons of industry. I never saw Sybil Radcliffe again, so I don
’
t know how she took the great man
’
s death. The last I heard she was in Florida with an asthmatic husband who sold real estate or used cars. I was glad to hear it. He is a lucky man. She was a brilliant girl, and my bet is that she got the message.

But I am anticipating. I was sitting in the executive suite high up in Chicago
’
s wintry and
“
somber
”
sky, feeling something very like despair. I should not have despaired: this was Chicago—the city that gave everything and asked nothing. A knock, tentative, came to the door. Rezipping my fly, I rose, walked across the carpet, and opened it. In through the door walked Ted Zirbes, who introduced himself as the Director of Press Relations for the Rock Island Railroad, come from the ninth floor where his offices were located to say hello and wish me well on my new assignment. I told him there was no longer any assignment.
“
Don
’
t worry about it,
”
he said.
“
C
’
mon down and work for me.
”
“
Are you kidding?
”
I said. He said that he wasn
’
t; at the end of the month I moved in LaSalle Street Station from the twelfth to the ninth floor, where they gave me a desk, a typewriter, an unlimited expense account, and the lordly title of Public Relations Representative-Managing Editor. For days after, I sat at my desk watching Ted with devout concern, waiting for him to smile and tell me the joke was over. But he never did. Almost all of the things that happened to me in Chicago aroused in me this giddy incredulity.

I loved that job more than any I ever had—or ever will
have. My main duties were the writing, the editing, the laying out, and the putting to bed of the company
’
s magazine, remarkably, even a little maniacally, called The Rocket, a name taken from the road
’
s quality passenger trains. I did a lousy job, knowing next to nothing about industrial writing and editing, and especially about the reading capabilities of the audience I was trying to reach (I was always being criticized for making my prose either too simple or too obscure) and would now, I know, be embarrassed to leaf through those issues I was responsible for. Still, I was trying, and in search of stories I went to towns the very names of which can still arouse in me a frenzy, such was the mystery and the promise they seemed to hold out for me. I went to Denver and Colorado Springs in Colorado, in Nebraska to Fairbury and Omaha. I went to Des Moines and Davenport and Ames and Newton and Iowa City in Iowa, to Dallas and Houston and Fort Worth in Texas. I went to Oklahoma City and El Reno in Oklahoma, to Milwaukee and St. Paul in Wisconsin and Minnesota. I went to Peoria and Joliet and Rock Island in Illinois, to Little Rock in Arkansas. All over the vast, endless, and awesome Midwest I went. I always traveled on the road
’
s Rockets.

On boarding I took a seat in the club car, crossed my flanneled legs, cleared my throat, ordered a Budweiser, and got ready to make jokes with the twangy salesmen. While talking with them, I might reach into my coat pocket, remove my leather pocket secretary, and casually proffer my card, saying as I passed it,
“
Fred Exley! PR! Rock Island!
”
Because I had a system or
“
white
”
pass, one good enough to take me any place on the road, I was deferred to by porters.
“
Anything else before dinner, Mr. Exley?
”
“
Why, yes, John
”
—a theatrical pause here—
”
you might bring these gentlemen
”
—regally flourishing my hand to take in the entire club car—
”
another drink before they have their dinners.
”
The salesmen would smile and nod approvingly at each other.
“
And so young to have such a big job,
”
those smiles seemed to say. By dinner I was alone in the car. At twilight, leaving Rock Island, I looked down and saw the massive, sluggish Mississippi flow by beneath me and, hardly having digested its historical emanations, its wonder, was passed into the corn country where the stalks, outlasting the limits of one
’
s vision, sway in the wind like the timeless moves of the sea. By nine I was in my roomette in bed. I lay long awake between clean sheets, the blinds flung up, watching, even feeling, the vast middle of America flow by and beneath me, seeing off in the distance the lights of the prairie towns, like the blinking of fireflies on a soft summer
’
s night, so quickly did one pass them by. I awoke, perhaps, at Colorado Springs. Disembarking, I took a deep, dizzying breath of the high, shrill air and, turning, saw the town, like a Dutch miniature of a Swiss village. Beyond the town was the mountain, Pike
’
s Peak, snowcapped in July and rising into the incredibly blue heavens—a mountain so pure of definition that it was all I could do to stay my hand from attempting to reach out and touch it. After my day
’
s work I drank martinis in the cocktail lounge of the Broadmoor, waiting for the blonde who never came, and for whom I never gave up waiting, such was my optimism and my contentment. It was a contentment all the more enhanced by the knowledge that when the trip was done, by Friday at the latest, I would be back in Chicago—home to the city I loved.

There I lived in that section called the Near North Side, a paradise for the young men and women—airline hostesses with airline hostesses, rising executives with rising executives, Junior Leaguers with Junior Leaguers, voyeurs with voyeurs —who overflowed its modern town houses and converted Victorian mansions, men and women who reigned, or were, in youth
’
s obliviousness, sure they reigned supreme there. The section had an absurd though touching notion of itself as the Greenwich Village of the Plains; but the young men I knew there seemed blatantly and refreshingly unburdened with things of the mind, and the fine, corn-bred, yellow-haired girls as succulently wholesome as cream of chicken soup. Never once in the two years I lived there was I distressed by the possibility—as perhaps I was in New York—that there were men and women in the area seeking to commit to paper or to canvas their joy, their grief, their passion. Never once did I detect in a saloon, as I had begun to detect in the Village, the dark, brooding silhouette of a man apart, a man caught up and held in awe by the singularity of his vision.