A Fan's Notes (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Frederick Exley

Sheepish and saddened by my fury, he hadn’t said a word in the half-hour we had driven around and had sat there hunched over the Cadillac’s wheel, just a runt whose legs barely reached the brake pedal, an earthenware dwarf. He was dirty, hot-browed and weary, old—old.

He exuded tenement beginnings, an aura of dark and oppressive places, rat-filled infancy, Saturday-night baths, underwear fouled with three days’ sweat and intimate body dirts;

Deborah had a big blue jaw.

I wasn’t surprised to see that she had kept her college texts, Adolescent Psychology, Living Religions of the World, Philosophy of Education, and the inevitable Margaret Mead, those symbols that she had suffered exposure to loftier things and by such exposure had become a sanctimonious and blubbering ninny.

When the day came (and like a bloody bowel movement, he said, it always came) that he discovered himself writing in incendiary tones about the need for a traffic light at the “corner of Myrtle Avenue and Shoshoni” (he reverenced and collected our Indian names) “Boulevard” and laughing aloud—roaring really, helpless to stay the tears streaming down his cheeks, all eyes in the city room cast apprehensively, somewhat amazedly, on him—he resigned in the interest of his “bloody sanity” and moved on to Wichita Falls—yearning, one gathered, so steadfastly for Fleet Street and room-temperature beer that one was always repressing an urge to ask why he didn’t go home.

Mr. Blue’s way of death was fitting. He had been utterly corrupted by America, and I find it proper that his carotid artery should have been severed by flak from a jumbo-sized can of mentholated shave cream.

To gauge the dictionary’s breadth when buying it, I had looked up thurible, an Oriental-looking container in which one burns incense, and gorp, a freakishly obese person who eats constantly because he achieves a kind of erotic splendor when sitting on the throne.

the majestic sweep of my novel would roar out once I could “see” my first sentence—roar out like Niagara through the head of a pin.

If by his own admission the husband and father of four had been recently arrested at the urinals beneath Grand Central for reaching over and grabbing a chesty and beribboned army colonel by the penis, in her charitableness Patience suffered a compulsion to ramble on for two pages describing the man’s commendable educational background, his undisputed ability as a provider for his family, his deaconship in the Episcopal Church, his unquenchable love for his wife and kids, his lavish grief at the whole sordid business, and—boom—here he was grabbing alien cocks.

He looked about to smile and reveal to a friend that he had just lost all the friend’s dough in a gold mine that bore no gold.

“In the balls, huh? Where’d ya ever hear that?” “Read it in Plutarch,” I said. “Plutarch, huh?” he said. “Sounds like a real horny book.

I was still, for I had the power and, no matter how adroitly Gifford handled himself, silently I said to myself, speaking in the direction of the tube, “Have your day, friend. In a matter of months, I’ll be more famous than you.”

As a result, I had for some time suspected that the demands required to keep that wedge firmly entrenched in the city’s skull were costing him dearly by way of conditioning and that the distractions of High Place were literally taking his eye from the ball.

I discovered I knew nothing whatever about the grueling, mundane business of making form out of fragments. Like a man with a handful of exquisite, or what in my vanity I was sure were exquisite, diamonds, I hadn’t the slightest notion of how to set them.

I burned it because on every page I had discovered I loathed the America I knew.

hate can redeem as well as love, but I was yet to articulate this truth and hence did not know that in writing a book hate is as valid a departure point as love.

Moreover, no longer having my dream to buffer me from the warmth of others, I did the worst thing I could have done: I fell quite hopelessly in love with my sons.

What friends I still had—and J. was one of the two, the other being the Counselor—had for a long time accepted the fact that the price of my friendship was both emotionally and financially dear.

It was J. who understood—and it troubled him deeply, I think—that my dependence was hurting him scarcely a bit while it was destroying me. He was, he knew, a party to a murder.

conversation, that made me see why Clarke’s had lasted. Clarke’s was a place of youth where we were no longer youths, a place of high optimism where we knew better.

but the friend of one’s Youth—he may be the only friend one ever has—never sees one’s defeat. Or almost never; and if he does, one can be certain it is too late for him.

To those who understand the slightness of an American’s traditions, the place of sports in his life, and New York City’s need to make do with what it has (the stadium, for instance, is a nearly impossible place to watch football), the Yankee Stadium can be a heart-stopping, an awesomely imposing place, and never more so than on a temperate and brilliant afternoon in late November.

In the same way that Shaw perhaps threw to some memory of him, he became that memory.

I fought because I understood, and could not bear to understand, that it was my destiny—unlike that of my father, whose fate it was to hear the roar of the crowd—to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others. It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan.

The malaise of writing—and it is of no consequence whether the writer is talented or otherwise—is that after a time a man writing arrives at a point outside human relationships, becomes, as it were, ahuman.

Our relationship had become an unending and distant Viennese waltz. To yank her abruptly to me and drift off into a plaintive, hot-panted fox trot would have disarmed her. My battered face proved the ultimate barrier between us.

He was atrociously dressed, his face haggard and bewhiskered, and people walked over and around him as though he did not exist, as perhaps for them he did not. At the moment my streetcar pulled directly beside him, it stopped abruptly, I looked down into his reposing face, and there I saw my own face with such devastating and chilling clarity that for the rest of the day I had suffered an exaggerated thirst accompanied by vertigo.

In that goodness I was aware of the dignity you were affording my shabby humanity; indeed, dwelling in it I at times felt something like grace. Not that it matters, but I tried to think of a way to repay your generosity; and such payment invariably settled on the truth that you’d be better rid of me. Be happy and tell my sons that I was a drunk, a dreamer, a weakling, and a madman, anything but that I did not love them.”

My sleek cheeks had grown flatulent, my girth fatty, my thin hand plumper than that of a thriving child’s;

After that unremitting spring of beer, pasta, Tia Maria, and futility, I found my body thirty pounds overweight, my cerebrum as dopey as a eunuch’s dong.

What it all amounted to was that my mother saw me old whereas she imagined me still young, and, worse, uncomely, whereas against the evidence of her eyes she wanted to find me attractive.

once dead I would be dumb forever—which, as Augie said, “is no reason to decline to speak and stir or to be what you are.”

bitch: I suppose you’re embarrassed even sitting with me!” Then I rose and, flatulent with rage, fled out of the barroom. I did so because it had suddenly occurred to me that my home town would have disbarred me from something if it could, preferably the human race.

More sobering, on leaving I would be once more “on the move,” be a part of the bewildering and stultifying movement that America has become; and the curse of movement is that during it one is never doing one’s own work but that of the world.

on the students’ arrival as seniors, would be used—oh, joy!—for a trip to New York City. The outing, I gathered, was to be a kind of initiation into the bewilderment of adulthood;

I had neither the patience nor the wit nor the wherewithal to give students less than I knew; worse, whatever intelligence I possessed was of that savagely unsympathetic kind which didn’t allow me to understand the student’s difficulty in grasping: sadly, I lacked the intelligence to simplify, and with an utterly monolithic and formidable pedantry I thought nothing of demanding that my students feed me back my own quackery.

If it comes at all, Emerson has cautioned that one’s call might not come for years. If it doesn’t, he remarks it as only a reflection of the universe’s faith in one’s abstinence, nothing to move the heart to fret.

What I am now certain I am beseeching them to consider is that of itself longevity is utterly without redeeming qualities, that one has to live the contributive, the passionate, life and that this can as well be done in twenty-six (hence Keats) as in a hundred and twenty-six years, done in no longer than the time it takes a man to determine whether the answer is yea or nay.