A Fan's Notes (27 page)

I had been in Chicago for almost two years by then, 1955 and 1956, and though I had completely disregarded football my first year in that happy city, during the autumn of 1956, after losing my job, I once again found that it was the only thing that gave me comfort. That fall was, ironically, the season when Gifford was having his greatest year in football, which culminated in his being voted by the other players in the league the Jim Thorpe Trophy—which made him, for that year at least, the greatest football player in the world. Most of my drinking companions were Chicago Bears fans—the most fanatical partisans on earth. Because the Bears were that year, as the Giants were in the East, headed for their division title, I spent most of the fall unmercifully needling Bear fans about what Gifford and the Giants were going to do to them in the championship game. I stayed in Chicago till December to watch the game on television from Yankee Stadium, the Giants winning 47-7, stayed to watch it and to rub it into the boys. I had no grace in victory, though. Chicago had gone bad for me. In triumph I was quite vicious, and within three hours of the game I was in two drunken fist fights, both of which were nasty and bloody, involving broken noses, split ears, cracked heads, and black eyes, some mine, some the other guys
’
. It was terrible in a way to leave that wonderful city in that mood. Right after these fights I was to pack a bag and go
“
on the road
”
for a few months. By the fall of 1957 I would be home on my mother
’
s davenport, staring at the ceiling and dreaming my dreams, waiting to be carted off to the private hospital the following spring, thence to Avalon Valley the immediately subsequent autumn. I know that I was sick even in Chicago; no one ever loved a city the way I loved that place, and it pains me deeply to have this final memory of it, seeing myself flailing away at drunken, angry faces, striking as if I were hitting out at the city that had so disenchanted me. It pains me because that disenchanted city—the one I knew in the final months—will, for me, never be the city I knew and loved for ever so long.

5 / Journey on a Davenport

At Christmas, in 1951, I flew from Los Angeles to New York City where I boarded the overnight train to Watertown, intent on spending the holiday at home. The train had no club car, but at one end of a passenger coach, serviced by a stainless-steel and closet-like kitchenette, were two booths, cozy and on either side of the aisle. I found myself drinking beer and eating ham sandwiches in one of these booths with a Marine sergeant returning from Korea, a vernal-cheeked coed with large breasts, coming from some cow-sounding college in Pennsylvania where, she had loftily announced, she was studying veterinary medicine, and a goateed and fraudulent-looking surgeon traveling to Montreal. In keeping with the season our spirits were lyrically jubilant, the surgeon was generous in buying the food and the drinks, and after a time we sang Christmas carols. The sergeant had a resonant, self-conscious baritone; and I, having no voice at all, amiably mouthed silent
“
silent nights
”
(as my teachers had made me do in grammar school so I wouldn
’
t undermine the melodious harmony of my classmates who, when singing, had stared with haughty disdain at the cretinous contortions of my lips). At one o
’
clock the porter asked us to call it a night. Because everyone was
crestfallen, the chivalrous surgeon bribed the Negro with a five-dollar bill, though the latter ordered us to knock off the caroling. For that reason we talked about our families and our homes well into the early morning, drinking the beer the bribe had procured us.

By first light, only I was left awake. As though the fatigue of war had abruptly caught up with and sundered him, the Marine had put his head on his folded hands on the table and was sleeping with such heaviness that his forehead appeared to have depressed into and become part of his wrists. The coed, her outsized breasts now demure and maiden-like, was snoozing in the shelter of the doctor
’
s salt-and-pepper sleeve, the surgeon
’
s cheek, flushed now with boozy contentment, resting familiarly on her soft brown hair. During the night the north country had undergone its worst storm in years, and for the eighty-mile distance from Utica to Watertown, while those intimate strangers slept huddled all about me, and while the steam engine heaved and fretted through the brilliant, the near-dazzling whiteness, I looked out the window and watched the cold, the frozen world go by me. In the vague way one is aware of the contours of the back of one
’
s head, I had always been aware that my corner of America was farm country, but only that morning did I realize how very northern or
“
Russian
”
—almost steppelike—it really was. After watching the slightly rolling, nearly treeless landscape for a long time, and doubtless abetted by the unconscious knowledge that I was rising on the map, I began to experience the oddly com forting sensation of ascending to the very top of the world, of rising to some place apart from the fitful concerns and harsh sorrows of men, to a glacial and opaline haven where a man, having been hard-used by the world or having used himself hard, might go and ask himself where things had gone wrong.

At the precise moment I disembarked and my foot hit the icy platform, I looked first at my instantaneously white-flecked sleeve, then skyward to see that it had begun snowing again. In what was to be the most memorable holiday of my life, it scarcely stopped snowing the entire week I was home. Snow clogged everything. Its plowed and mountainous banks hid the houses from view. No cars moved, and because the sidewalks would be days in getting cleared, one was. forced to walk in the middle of the glistening streets between the snowy mountains on either side, a dreamy white world wherein one ambulated without fear of being flattened by an Oldsmobile. Their faith in the supremacy of the Detroit product lamentably touching, middle-aged men shoveled furiously, attempting to loosen their Fords from Nature
’
s perverseness. As if those automobiles were extensions of themselves without which they could not live, they wielded their shovels with bent-back and vapor-exhaling dedication. The sky cleared, a few cars were loosed and began moving splutteringly through the embanked and narrow aisles, the sky once again clouded over, snow came, and the cars chugged, chugged, and stopped again. With renewed and exasperated vigor (it never occurred to them to walk), the men once again engaged the snow with angry shovels, their rampantly palpitating hearts threatening to burst ( I don
’
t know how many we lost to coronaries that year), while in a gang my friends and I moved up the shimmering white corridors, jeering at them. My friends were younger then and did not know that this was this, that that; though some of us might have been acute enough to know that though Detroit owned America, Detroit didn
’
t yet own us; we had the youthful and heartfelt hopes of being
“
our own men.
”
With youth
’
s arrogant confidence that we were so markedly dissimilar from those shovelers, we walked in that remembered brilliance, shouting,
“
Shovel, you fucking dummies!
”
That the shovelers might know our four-letter bravado was not to be trifled with, we then pounded each other on the back and roared with haughty laughter: a strained camaraderie designed to deter any of the braver shovelers from approaching us. Making our way to the next saloon, we drank draft beer in comfortable booths, cribbed and passed off as our own a favorite professor
’
s remark on Plato or Aquinas or Twain, and continued to sneer at
“
dummies
”
unable to see the beauty and completeness of a world in which one did nothing but walk about in the snow, drink draft beer in crowded booths, and try to understand a world not governed by automatic transmissions. Now I see in that laughter a good deal of desperation and sadness. About to leave the haven of our separate universities and be thrown onto the brutal free-spinning of the world, as we walked arm in arm through the snow, we carried with us, if only unconsciously, the knowledge that it would be our last holiday together; and we drank and laughed and sneered with the resolute sadness of men who knew that tomorrow we
’
d be trying to free our own mortgaged Buicks from our own snow-locked drives. That is what most of us ended doing. I didn
’
t; but I don
’
t question that my friends were right and I wrong, that they were happy and I was not, that theirs was the hard and mine the easy way. What always saddened me on confronting them was the surety that had I been foolish enough to bring up
“
old times,
”
none would have allowed himself a memory of sticking his finger into the vaporous and flaky air and shouting,
“
Shovel, you fucking dummies!
”
A self-destructively romantic man, I accepted our jeering defiance as a pact; forever.

The
“
top of the world
”
was where I went when I had ceased to function on the road. After fleeing Chicago in early 1957, I had lived in many cities, and in the late fall of that year had ended in jail in Miami where I was brought before the splenetic judge and told I was a
“
fatuous lunatic.
”
Those words stinging me into numbness, I decided it was time to head north. Because my mother had for years been remarried to a man I scarcely knew, I had qualms about doing so. I was aware that her husband owned a business that would put food in my stomach, and that as a wedding present he had bought her an old limestone farmhouse at Pamelia Four Corners (an irritant in the highway some ten miles north of the city) where I could—if I were taken in, and utterly divorced from the comings and goings, the struggles, the victories, the defeats of other men—ask myself where things had gone wrong; but this awareness did not mitigate my fears of being turned away. That my lunacy had been recognized was chastening enough, but the judge
’
s gratuitous
“
fatuous
”
carried with it intimations that I was in a blubbering, nose-picking state; and I had visions of arriving at my mother
’
s door, garbed not in the
“
attractive,
”
melancholic dementia of the poet but in the drooling, masturbatory, moony-eyed condition of the Mongoloid. That I feared my mother would turn even the latter away indicates the extent paranoia had already dented my psyche. Offering the excuse that she wasn
’
t good at
“
things like that,
”
my mother never learned to drive a car. It was not that simple. The melody of her life was as unvarying in its scale as a moon-June rhyme put to music: she believed in wholesome food, clean clothes, and warm beds for her family, and she viewed things like driving automobiles as extraneous, perhaps decadent, as if the artless melody would be burdened down with precious and contrapuntal themes. Such a blunt engagement with life never failed to astonish and charm her family, though there were times when we grew impatient with it: we yearned for her sophistication and longed to make of her a swan-necked lady with lorgnette. Deferring to such yearnings, she once in fact took a driving lesson.

With my father play-acting the amused and tolerant tutor in a world of buffoons and in a jolly, whimsical style preceding her into the front seat of our Model A Ford roadster, she got behind the wheel, on his direction shifted into first gear, accelerated the gas pedal, released the clutch, and froze. Before doing so, and for reasons unfathomable, she had
“
strangled
”
the wheel violently to the left, and the Ford went round and round the churchyard in increasingly large circles. Losing his suave tutorial cool and going ramrod straight, my father bellowed at her to relax. Doing so tentatively, my mother
’
s partially lax hands on the wheel caused the weird and ever-enlarging circles. At the same time, the released energy dispersed to her foot and weighted the accelerator, so that with each new and widening circle the car accumulated maddening speeds. At the edge of the yellow field stood my brother and sister and I, not knowing whether to shriek with laughter or terror. There was only one massive, horny-trunked elm in all that great yard; and when it became evident that on the next lap, or certainly the one after, the blameless Ford and the innocent elm would meet, we stood agape and tremulous with anticipation. At the last possible moment, having regained his impressive nonchalance, my father thrust his leg over the shifting gear and trenchantly applied the brake, halting the car only inches from the tree and giving both Mother and himself a thumping forehead crack against the flush and

durable windshield of that marathon automobile. In its frustration the Ford rocked thwartedly back and forth. From underneath its biting tires there arose great clouds of August dust. The car shook itself to a stall, the dust settled, and silence descended. Breathless, my brother, my sister, and I ran to them, where we remained speechless, searching for bruises, for dangling limbs, for those obscene gashes ready to yield up

their torrents of fatal blood. Unable to gauge the condition or temper of the car
’
s stunned occupants, we were frightened. When finally they disembarked, both were ashen but, exceptfor their already ballooning brows, they appeared to be unhurt. With my brother, who was the eldest, taking the lead, we laughed joyously with relief. Joined quickly in the laughter by my father, who pensively rubbed his brow as he laughed, we watched my mother thunder angrily toward the cottage. She was pained and humiliated at our amused reaction to her already professed insistence that she was not good at
“
things like that.
”