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“What the clause means,” one young and spirited teacher said finally, winking outrageously, “is that everybody, but everybody, daddy, passes.” That outrageous wink answered everything. Through some impossible-to-administer policy, the faculty had been rendered moral monsters. Asked to keep one eye open, cool and detached, in appraising half the students, we were to keep the other eye winking as the rest of the students were passed from grade to grade and eventually into a world that would be all too happy to teach them, as they drifted churlishly from disappointment to disaster, what the
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Why did football bring me so to life? I can’t say precisely. Part of it was my feeling that football was an island of directness in a world of circumspection.
as though they were telling me that getting myself proclaimed mad and dragged away a number of times was only a childish and petulant refusal to accept their way of life as the right way, that in seeking some other way I had been assuming a courage and superiority I hadn’t possessed.
his age I had sought out some dismal creature for advice. Having gone to fat-assed, “successful” souls (making the American mistake of equating success with wisdom),
My initiation into sex had taken place on the ground behind a billboard sign advertising beer within walking distance from where I was now lying.
“I didn’t know you were married.” I told him my problem was that I hadn’t known it either.
Though my father had been dead for eighteen years, he had in his day been a superb athlete, as good, some say, as any who ever came out of northern New York—certainly no great distinction but not without its effect on a son who had never been permitted to forget it.
It is a terrifying thing to have a wedge driven into one’s narrow circle of love.
Other men might inherit from their fathers a head for figures, a gold pocket watch all encrusted with the oxidized green of age, or an eternally astonished expression; from mine I acquired this need to have my name whispered in reverential tones.
Knowing nothing about writing, I had no trouble seeing myself famous.
But the denial of one’s father, in whatever spirit, requires great sympathy between the denier and the denied, and this my father and I had never had.
Moreover, my father’s shadow was so imposing that I had scarcely ever, until that moment, had any identity of my own. At the same time I had yearned to emulate and become my father, I had also longed for his destruction. Steve Owen not only gave me identity; he proved to me my father was vulnerable.
I quite naturally became an English major with a view to reading The Books, The Novels and The Poems, those pat reassurances that other men had experienced rejection and pain and loss.
It was this interruption that forced me finally to accept the knowledge that I was at no university; more importantly, that those apple-cheeked sons and daughters don’t really learn much of man’s heritage at a university.
We had failed our families by our inability to function properly in society (as good a definition of insanity as any);
for I have no doubt that the obstetrician no sooner swats the infant’s buttocks inducing the hysterical scream of life than that a certain milieu is prepared and waiting for him, a milieu in which already the shadows and shades exist which will determine whether he goes to Avalon Valley or the White House.
I always envisioned that grand thing sheathed in the Tyrolese corduroy of mountain hikers; and I had this vision of following it, so sheathed, up that pale precipice to the iridescent land where, once attained and in a tremble of exhaustion and anticipation, I would decorduroy, depant, and deflower her among the flora, the world’s colors coming into focus in the soft raven down of her thingamajig.
I thought the best way to act in the showers was quite manly, and for a few weeks I had stood among those steam-glistening, wispy young men vigorously lathering my genitalia and buttocks, and yodeling (I am a good yodeler) in a studiously indifferent way.
He said that while he and others tried to talk their novels out in sidewalk cafés, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I sat in those saloons with them, sipping highballs, and through the muted light of the place whispered outrageous falsehoods into their pink ears. My hand dropped into their laps to feel their thighs tighten and reject my fingers with the rigidity of their virtue.
I was all these gentlemen and more, though after a time I settled finally on my favorite, the surgeon-in-residence at the House of High Hopes, young Dr. Horatio Penis (spelled alarmingly, pronounced with Gallic gentility). “Doc Päh-nee,” I always introduced myself.
Indeed I wrote so many weekends that some wild charlatan of a tour bus driver, pointing upward, began bringing the attention of his complement of sightseers to me. Unquestionably having been told that I was one of the “struggling artists” said to inhabit the area, these people invariably waved frantically at me from behind the glass dome of their bus, so happy were they to share this fragile moment with one who might one day be hailed a genius, so pleased that they could go back to Omaha and tell Cousin Lucy, “We saw one of them writer fellows—in his underwear!” I never waved back. I thought
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By the time of contact it was getting light, very cold, with that glacial, white world spread all about one on the lonely road;
It was all over then; the terrible thing was that we yet had to go through the formal motions of dissolving it; we had, as humans do, to lay blame, to kill each other a bit, to pick up the pieces and move on.
walking away had rescued me from the slow, dwindling emasculation undergone by so many of my brethren; and this, ironically, perhaps even a little miraculously, was the truth. For in the same way that a man’s defect can be his virtue (as a gross physical ugliness often renders in its bearer a fine, subtle, and true aesthetic), I came to understand that my sexual failure in the end redeemed me, saved me from an almost certain castration.
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.
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.
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.
Hooting, we had no idea that my brother, who jeered as loudly as anyone, would in no time at all be in a rather ludicrous uniform of his own, with a few million other Americans called upon to pay the heavy toll for having failed to recognize insanity for the pernicious evil it is.
In a land where movement is virtue, where the echo of heels clacking rapidly on pavement is inordinately blest, it is a grand, defiant, and edifying gesture to lie down for six months.
there is time being lived, and that same time as it is relived in the mind five minutes, five years, five centuries later;
I came to understand the medium as subversive. In its deceit, its outright lies, its spinelessness, its weak-mindedness, its pointless violence, in the disgusting personalities it holds up to our youth to emulate, in its endless and groveling deference to our fantasies, television undermines strength of character, saps vigor, and irreparably perverts notions of reality.
The world of the soap opera is the world of the Emancipated American Woman, a creature whose idleness is employed to no other purpose but creating mischief.
a bosomless and glacial sexuality which, taken all together, brought to their faces a witchy, self-indulgent suffering that seemed compounded in equal parts of unremitting menstrual periods, chronic constipation, and acute sexual frustration.
I spent a lot of time unctuously urging the men to take a stand and tell the witches to blow it out their asses. Indeed, so difficult was it to imagine an enormous penis rising up and bursting forth from behind that curtain of gray flannel, I began to wonder how those apple-cheeked children who contributed so many crow’s-feet to the women’s eyes were conceived unless by an incubus.
Subtlety is wasted on a drowning man,
For weeks I saw him only at supper; and if I said anything to him at all, I said it with elfish and bitchy aloofness: “How’s business?”—pronouncing business as though I were saying turd.
indeed, such was the fury with which I worked—and like most men who don’t know why they work at what they do, I worked with a fury that prevented my asking why
He was a strong man in every way, and a good man, and that strength had not been acquired in pursuit of the dollar but for the reasons most decent men grow strong: by meeting the needs of those people close to them.
The moment the game started she fell silent, studying me, I’m certain, with that bemused curiosity with which a woman views a man’s enthusiasms, knowing, as she instinctively does, that for the most part a man’s preoccupations are trivial, even contemptible things.
there resided the intelligence of an authentic cynic. The Counselor possessed this Ishmael-like quality, this thing ungroomable, this cowlick in his psyche;
Like most Americans, though, I had led that numbingly chaste and uncommitted existence in which one forms neither sympathies nor antipathies of any enduring consequence.
She was a horn-rimmed, stout, pale, severe-looking old cow, but Oscar loved her and one knew that it would be a long time before another woman moved his manhood to desire. Oscar was largehearted and beautiful to be with.
about which I perhaps know a good deal less than I imagine. I was almost certain that though he longed to kiss the female pudendum, he had never done so. In retrospect I recall his conversations as little more than formal, Oriental bridges joining islands lush with that, the inevitable subject.
At an oppressively fastidious dinner I once said, “Pass the fucking butter,” putting the emphasis on the obscenity so that my host wouldn’t be rattled by doubts and would thereby be unmistakably offered the alternative of knocking me down or, subject to his sense of the decencies, at least exiling me from his table.
