A Fan's Notes (31 page)

One bright day in early September when the grass was new-cut, I stopped at the filling station next door. While the attend ant was feeding my car two dollars
’
worth of Regular, I nonchalantly inquired whether that wasn
’
t the house of the Edmund Wilson. It was indeed. Not only that, but the attendant, an obliging fellow, pointed out the very window behind which Wilson could often be seen praising or damning the literature of the generations. As I looked my heart did a neat and complete flip-flop: unless my imagination was playing tricks, the great man was at the very moment moving behind and away from the window. Wilson was right about literary idolaters. During the nine-or ten-mile drive to Boonville where one again picks up the main route south, like an unrequited lover I was in a state of grieving agitation. At Boonville I stopped at the limestone, white-trimmed Hulbert House, certainly one of the most beautiful hotels in America. There I drank three beers, simmered down, and proceeded south out of the cold country, thinking that next time through I would conjure some marvelously ingenious excuse to approach his door and knock, at least tentatively.

Occasionally I did some
“
writing
”
of my own. Rising from the davenport, with Christie III hard on my heels, I ascended the stairs, sat at a round card table in my bedroom, and tried to construct paragraphs about anything save Bunny Sue, who had brought me to that farm to lie on that davenport, feeding cookies to a dog. I tried to write about the way rain falls on a city street, the way a pretty swimming girl moves through the water, the way darkness comes to towns along the Pacific lit toral. Sometimes I lingered for an hour over a single sentence, marveling at the intricate and various combinations words could take. It was an act of luck and relentless stubbornness if I finished a single paragraph. My stamina was such that most of the time I
’
d complete no more than three or four sentences run together precisely the way I wanted them, and by then I would be literally too tired to sit up in a chair. Rising, at the same time throwing mental bouquets to those men who had mastered the art, I would take the half-dozen steps to the bed and lie next to Christie III who had lain at the end of the bed watching every move of the pencil. Once I was on the bed, Christie III relaxed and closed his eyes, and I indulged myself either in memories of my father or in what had become for me an alarmingly elaborate fantasy, about neither of which it then occurred to me to write.

The crowd
’
s wedge between my father and me effected its most distressing cleavage when I was a freshman in high school, playing (or not playing) junior varsity basketball. Not a starter, my vanity wouldn
’
t allow me to believe I shouldn
’
t be on the first team. At thirteen I was already having my abilities unfavorably compared with those of my father. Not having the stomach for such witless collations, I had for a long time wanted to quit not only that team but sports entirely. The desire became uppermost, and a matter of grievous expediency, when one night prior to the varsity game the Jayvees were scheduled to play against an old-timers
’
team led by my father. I got sick. My father sat on the edge of the bed and gently rubbed my head; and though we both knew why I was sick, we avoided saying as much. Gently he asked me to get up, for him; to go through this one game, for him; telling me that if I did this one thing, for him, he
’
d permit me to quit the team after the game. The gymnasium was packed, and the better part of the evening I sat on the bench stupefied, drifting between nausea and fear of having to go into the game. In an effort to humor the crowd, the coach ordered me in to guard my father in the waning moments of the final quarter. Nearly thirty-nine then, sweating profusely and audibly huffing from years of Camel smoking, from the center of the court and to the jubilant hilarity of the crowd, my father sank three set shots, characterized for me by a deafening
swiiisssshhhhh
of ball through net, in the less than two minutes I covered him.

After the game we walked home to Moffett Street across Hamilton Street, which was a lonely street then and settled with very few houses. The cold was fierce, the moon was bright, and the snow uttered melancholy oaths beneath our boots. In penance my father had his gloveless hand resting affectionately on my shoulder.
“
I
’
m sorry about tonight,
”
he said.
“
I was lucky.
”
But we both knew that he hadn
’
t been; and all the way home I had had to repress an urge to weep, to sob uncontrollably, and to shout at him my humiliation and my loathing.
“
Oh, Jesus, Pop!
Why? Why? Why?
”
I have always been sorry I didn
’
t shout that humiliation. Had my father found the words to tell me why he so needed The Crowd, I might have saved my soul and now be a farm-implement sales man living sublimely content in Shaker Heights with my wife Marylou and six spewling brats. Neither of us knew that night that in little over a year my father would be dead from the cancer which was doubtless even then eating away at him. But at that moment, with his ungloved hand exposed to the fierce cold and resting familiarly on my shoulder in apology for the words he could not utter, I was wishing he were dead. Among unnumbered sins, from that damning wish I seek ab
solution.

The fantasy I nourished had only figuratively to do with gold mines in Eldorado or the seduction of dusky mulattoes in Port Said. While on the road I had worked for a time as a bartender in Colorado and had lent to a white-haired and dignified-looking stranger, with one tale of woe or another, twelve dollars to get home to Cheyenne. On my meager salary, it was a gesture which my boss deemed insane and wouldn
’
t permit me to forget. Motivated by the guilt of his own stony-heartedness, and at every opportunity, he sneeringly referred to me in front of the customers as
“
Money Bags
”
and
“
The Poor Man
’
s Friend, Freddy Exley.
”
Without really believing it, I responded by saying,
“
Don
’
t worry about it—he
’
ll send it.
”
But as I continued to try to justify myself against my boss
’
s constant baiting, his irrational, near-lunatic wrath, I came after a time to believe that the man really would send it, adamantly and tiresomely repeating,
“
I know he will.
I know
goddam well he will
.
”
Notwithstanding my self-induced brain washing, the kindly-looking man never did send the money; I went back on the road, forgot all about him; and it was only on settling onto the davenport for my extended siege that I again began thinking of him, except that now, instead of twelve dollars, a battery of attorneys arrived one day at the farm and told me that the old boy had died up yonder there in Cheyenne. His heart had ceased to pump at the very moment his latest well had gushed forth its four hundred barrels per minute. In gratitude for a kindness once rendered him, he had named me his legatee to the tune of—well, first it was a million, then ten, and then, as the weeks progressed and my needs became more extravagant, a cool billion. Why not two?

The first thing I did was purchase the New York Giants, which cost me a bundle—fifteen million. The price was so unbridledly dear because the owners of the team, the Mara brothers, were doing what they most wanted to do in life; and as one of my more articulate counselors had pointed out,
“
Yuh can
’
t buy a happy man.
”
To that questionable premise I had taken a long, contemplative drag on my Benson & Hedges; had looked evenly, perhaps a trifle coldly, at the platoon of snug-shouldered legal lights seated anxiously about the mahogany conference table; and with something like ice cubes in my voice had said,
“
Well, let
’
s put it this way,
counselors
”
—I was utterly menacing by then—
”
you make those
happy Irishmen
an offer they can
’
t turn down.
”
A forbidding, awe some hush had descended upon the table. Legal eyeballs had clacked round in their sockets and had terrifyingly confronted one another.
“
You mean, chief,
”
one bewildered attorney had finally ventured,
“
that the sky
’
s the limit?
”
Taking another drag from my Benson & Hedges, I had taken my sweet time exhaling the smoke and had jauntily replied,
“
You got the point,
bright
boy.
”
That is how I went through my first fifteen million.

Among the Thousand Islands, I then built for the team the most elaborate training camp imaginable. In the same way that Bunny Sue had been my dream of person, the lush green islands, the heart-stopping blue river, had always been my dream of place—the place to which, while
“
traveling
”
about America, I had compared all other places and found them wanting. Scattered in an intricately planned pattern about the islands were football fields, conditioning gymnasiums, and posh living quarters for the players and their families, a theater on this island, a golf course on that one. Smack and rather astonished-looking in the middle of one of the larger islands in my pigskin empire was a vast, gabled, candy-striped hotel, the Giant Inn, rooms by reservation well in advance only.

Occupying and making my headquarters in red-leather booth Number 1 of a heavy-beamed, mahogany-lined bar, I was a kind of intellectually aloof Toots Shor and inaccessible to all but a chosen few: Ernest Hemingway, Marilyn Monroe, Edmund Wilson, Lee Remick, John Cheever, Sophia Loren, Vladimir Nabokov, Ingrid Bergman, Saul Bellow, Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Penn Warren, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, and some select others. Behind a pair of shaded spectacles, dressed in herringbone, vested tweed suits, sipping sour mash on the rocks, browsing through the essays of Chesterton, everyone, even
“
my
”
players, pointed me out rather breathlessly. It was a homage to which I occasionally responded. Nodding to my press agents who hovered constantly about the bar that I was at the moment
“
available,
”
I
’
d permit either player or guest (one had to give the latter something for his fifty dollars a day) to be escorted to my table for an introduction and on very rare occasions—occasions which they unquestionably cherished throughout their pedestrian lifetimes—I invited them to join me for a single drink, no more, and I had a devastating way of arching my brows into half-moons to herald the end of the conversation. Trying to determine how accessible my table should be to Gifford gave me the devil
’
s own time. Finally deciding that it would be bad for team morale to favor him over the other players, I did concede him a rather cursory nod as he passed to and from the bar and had a grand time imagining him thinking,
“
I know that smug son of a bitch from some
place.
”

In the hot afternoons I took my private elevator from the bar to my penthouse suite at the top of the hotel. A wide, carpeted, cool suite done in pastels, its great picture windows opened to view the islands for miles around. Showering, and drawing the beige curtains so that the room was bathed in a burst-of-morning Venetian light, I lay down on the bed and buzzed downstairs to have one of my hand-picked, college-girl lifeguards sent up to me. Sighing contentedly, I lighted a cigarette and hummed. They came meekly, standing timidly in the middle of the carpeted floor, their golden arms hung laxly at their twitching sides. With trembling fingers I slid the straps of their black, Olympic-style swimsuits from their finely tanned shoulders, exposing them to the waist.
“
Gee, Mr. Exley,
”
they invariably said at this point,
“
I never thought you
’
d get around to me.
”
My lips caressed those shoulders then; just before slipping the suits the rest of the way off and lifting them onto the great sateen bed, I suavely paraphrased a little Eliot:
“
There is always time, my young one—time for you and time for me, and time yet for—
”

On awakening I would kick Christie III in the ass, say,
“
Wake up, yuh good-for-nothin
’
bum!
”
We would descend the stairs, flick on the television to the Kiddie Kartoons, lie back down on the couch, and wait for Mom to call us to supper. It would not be to the two-inch-thick cuts of prime rib I favored at the Giant Inn but to ordinary meat loaf.

Except about Christie III, whom she thought I pestered too much, I don
’
t once remember having a talk with my mother during those months. It was true that I pestered the dog. Such was my loneliness that after a time I ascribed human characteristics to the mutt. I talked to him constantly (
“
Let me tell you about the ambiguity of Henry James, Christie
”
). I taught him to sit up manlike, his spine leaning against the back of the davenport; and with my arm thrown buddy-like over his shoulder, we sat and
“
watched
”
the television together. I even made him a little blue sweatshirt, a replica of my own, and with fastidious care dressed him in it. My mother said,
“
Oh,
don
’
t!
”
;
but she laughed.
“
For Christ
’
s sake, he loves it,
”
I said. Then I picked him up and rolled him roughly around my chest while he feigned growling ferociously and snapped, toothlessly, at my nose.
“
He
’
s my lover boy. It
’
s all very homo sexual! Right, Christie?
”
My mother laughed, but added,
“
You shouldn
’
t talk like that.
”
An innocent who had for so many years kept her mind unsullied by evil, she was weighed down by my silent refusal to offer an explanation of what had brought me to that davenport, but not nearly so much as by what that silence told her of the things I had discovered within myself. Looking abruptly up, I would find her studying me, alarmed, at times almost astonished; and then, detecting that I was aware of her, she would timidly turn away and go back to her dusting. Steinbeck never explicitly tells us what happened to Kino, who, having gone out in the world and discovered its evil, and the evil within himself, comes back to the estuary to live among the simple fishermen. But he tells us enough to suggest that Kino lived out his life a man apart from those innocents, a man who aroused in them shudders of distaste for something they understood only instinctively. Looking at my mother, I often sensed in her something like this shuddering repulsion. She was right in feeling this way. Out on the road I had discovered my own putrefaction, had discovered in my heart
murder
, utter, brutal, and conscienceless murder.