“I might even use that. Afterward I might—I say, / might—drive up to the Schine Inn in Massena, put it in the parking lot in the rear, go through the back door, stroll as pretty as you fucking please through the lobby, step out the front door and into an Impala or Lincoln or Caddie next to a perfectly proper businessman—I have a few who owe me, baby” (probably men for whom he’d torched businesses, poor bastards!) “and get my ass royally chauffeured to Platts-burg or Rouse’s Point or Ogdensburg where maybe, that is, fucking maybe, I might move in with a lovely half-breed nurse of my acquaintance, or with a fifty-two-year-old widow who likes to mama me, or maybe even with the mayor’s wife. After a week or ten days of lolling about getting my cock sucked, I’d have my Iroquois maiden, my fifty-two-year-old mama, or His Excellency’s wife drive me home.”
“And where the hell is that?”
“Hey, man, we got a bargain. Remember?”
This was true. Our deal was that if Toby were ever in trouble, no matter how desperately so, he’d never seek refuge in the old lady’s house. He’d never tell me of any of his capers on which the statute of limitations hadn’t expired. Above all, Toby would never tell me of anything he had on the drawing board. My part of the bargain was simple. I would never probe him about that mysterious Shangri-la he called, for whatever reason, “home.”
On the day we were on the dirt road cruising at seventy further up into the mountains, the early April snow melting and rendering the road soupy in spots, the lovely tall pines so encroaching our passage we seemed to be moving cramped between high stunning green cliffs, on the day I sought Toby’s opinion of l’affaire Hearst, we were on one of Toby’s chives. Every ten days to two weeks he’d walk through the front door, charmingly salute the old lady (she thought him “a nice guy”), ascend the stairs to my attic studio, inquire if I weren’t sick of working on Pages from a Dum-dum Island, and ask if I wouldn’t like to take a drive. Invariably I said I was indeed sick of Dum-dum Island and would indeed like to go for a drive.
These drives always carried with them a delicious forbidden tension. During them Toby never talked save when, as in the case of Patty Hearst, I initiated the conversation. Toby never talked but his eyes were everywhere. On these drives I got to know my home state almost as well as Toby. We’d go as far north as Malone (where my father was born), to Geneseo, south of Rochester in the west, southeast in the Mohawk Valley to Gloversville, to Waverly on the southern tier. Toby always drove on back roads through New York State towns which in my mid-forties I’d never known existed. It was as if we were somehow moving through a dream or nightmare of endless Thornton Wilder Our Towns. Whether Toby needed gas or not, he stopped at isolated gas stations, bought a Coke, some peanut butter-cheese crackers, and a Hershey bar with almonds, and struck up a conversation with the grease monkey.
“Who’s the genius who decided to stick fuel pumps in this godforsaken place?”
If a cocky and indignant attendant snapped back, “Don’t worry yourself, fella, about what goes into that register,” I always moaned and thought, “That poor bastard.” On arriving back in the Bay, Toby would always empty the glove compartment and give me piles of peanut butter-cheese sandwiches and Hershey bars with almonds. He told me I could give them to the old lady or throw them into the garbage as I saw fit.
In Waverly or Gloversville Toby’d abruptly brake the Ass in front of the local bank, histrionically slam the heel of the palm of his hand against his forehead, and with grotesque and laughable sincerity explain he’d offered to buy dinner that night but had only two one-hundred-dollar bills on him. He had to get them changed as the owners of these “shitkicker eateries” were always rendered epileptic at the sight of a C-note. When I baited him, as I invariably did, by saying I had plenty of smaller bills, Toby always replied with feigned outrage that he’d invited me and would goddamn well observe the proprieties by playing host. In his observation of life’s amenities, Toby was truly wondrous to behold.
I had Toby’s modus operandi down pat. He’d never go near a bank on a busy day, Monday or Friday. He was strictly a Tuesday-to-Thursday man and he’d never change these hundreds save at slow hours in the morning and between 1:30 and 2:30 in the afternoon. To break two hundred-dollar bills into ten twenties never took him less than fifteen minutes, sometimes a half hour, occasionally even longer. When on his return I asked, as I also habitually did, if the cashier were a slow counter, one of those unfortunate souls who reads with his lips, Toby always roaringly gave his ritualistic reply—one cockamamie tale or another.
“My god, no. There wasn’t anyone in there but this uglie-buglie skinny four-eyed nineteen-year-old. Not bad boobs, a rather curiosity-arousing ass. I felt sorry for her, started making with the palaver, and turned on the charm. Within five minutes the pathetic creature wanted my cock in her mouth”—right hand off the wheel and raised Boy Scout fashion: Toby the Good making vows to a jury—”so badly her salivary glands were pumping like the pistons on the Ass. She’s been married six months to little Jimmy Thaxton who works down the street in the hardware store.
They’re saving up for a down payment on a split-level. She showed me this wretched little costume jewelry wedding band. It made me want to weep, Exley. I almost came out, slid under the Ass, grabbed the magnetic box I’ve got built into a lead weight, and gave her one of those thousand-dollar diamond-inlaid white gold bands. I might have, too, had not her salivary secretions become so pronounced the spit was leaking all over her funny little chin. Imagine, Exley! Six months married to little Jimmy Thaxton down there in Scrooge’s pots-and-pans emporium and she wants to blow me! What the hell are these kids up to today? And can’t any of these young bucks take care of their child brides? I mean, if s sad, really sad, but kind of nauseating! You know what I mean?”
7
Toby Farquarson III was indignant. As I say, when Toby Farquarson III became indignant at the absence of morals in the modern world, he was astounding to behold. And for all I knew the cashier had been a haggard doddering spinsterish seventy. What I did know was that when it was to his advantage, Toby had the charm and boldness to initiate and perpetuate conversations with all manner of people, and that with cashiers he would assuredly be con-vivially chatting away and listening with half a cerebrum, the other half being utterly devoted to a relentless scrutiny of every nook and cranny of the bank. Toby was never more outraged than at my having the dense audacity to introduce Patty Hearst into the chatter of one of those stealthy searches he called “drives.” It was rather as if I’d condemned the entire medical profession for the proverbial solitary quack who leaves a scalpel where the appendix had been. That sick clamp-toothed smile which always somewhat unnerved me froze upon Toby’s countenance. Then, as if he abruptly realized I was the only one in the world to whom he confided (with others he claimed it was “making palaver”), he unclinched his teeth, opened his mouth cavernously, and began to roar.
“You goddamn fool! You goddamn fool! Were there any justice Hearst shoulda got burned to a cinder with the rest of that Moo-moo Liberation Group in that dump in LA. What do those meatballs know about freedom? You know who’s free?—you horse’s ass! I’m free! That’s because I work alone—the same as you do, baby. I mean, we’re both fucking paranoid psychopaths. All writers are! The only difference between me and you guys, you ain’t got the balls to shove a sawed-off shotgun in a bank manager’s face. Can you imagine taking that drippy-nosed teeny-bopper Hearst on a fucking bank job? Sheer lunacy! That’d be as irresponsible as putting your boxer Killer behind the wheel of the Ass. And the fucking FBI? Who can ever take those clowns seriously again? You know—and I’m not shitting you, Exley—a few months back I actually thought seriously of going to whatsiz-whozit—you know, Hoover’s replacement—Kelley!—and telling him that for a hundred big ones I’d find Hearst and the Harrises within six weeks and bring them in or take my twelve-gauge, pop in some lovely double-aught buck, and off their fucking skulls. Yeah, I’d’a found ‘em in six weeks and I do
n’t even know the fucking West Coast. And I’d’a offed them too! Offed them for the magnitude of their imbecility. You know, the way the parents of that Betty Lou Schlock wanted to pull the plug on that lump of protoplasm down in Jersey?”
“Karen Ann Quinlan,” I said.
“Incidentally, writer man, the way Ms. Karen Ann got to be mush was mixing alcohol with too many of those funny pills you keep mooching from me! And you know what’s so wildly ironical—farcical?. From what we now know about that prick J. Edgar, he’d of probably given me a contract for a fucking hundred grand!”
Toby Farquarson III was legendary in upstate New York, a victim of upstate, of the times, and of himself. About “himself’ I didn’t for a long time learn much more than everyone else knew. I’d heard about Toby for months, had even become friendly with him without realizing it was he because he was not at all what I’d envisioned and because, whereas he’d introduced himself to me as Toby, everyone else spoke of him, even when he spoke in whispers—and one always spoke of Toby in whispers, looking over his shoulder as he did so—as Farr. It was Farr this and Farr that and Farr the other thing, a recurringly whispered paranoid-hued din.
“Don’t you know Farr, Exley? Sure you do. I’ve seen you with the fucking guy!”
“I don’t know him.”
Farr’s story varied with the teller, it being agreed only that he hailed from the Adirondacks. It was said that Farr came from Old Forge or Tupper Lake or Lake Placid and was the most gifted athlete to come out of upstate in years. On scholarship he’d gone to Ohio State or Michigan or Notre Dame or Oklahoma and there he’d severely torn cartilage in a knee or suffered a concussion that had kept him unconscious for a week or had one of the worst shoulder separations in clinical history, this as a sophomore when he was already starting. Whatever the injury, Farr had promptly dropped out of college and entered his chosen “profession,” one not as unlikely as it seems.
In upstate, boys grow up with guns in their hands, learn early on a weapon’s awesome capacities; and I know, for example, there are more guns in the Bay than there are people, that is, more guns than the number of people who make up our permanent winter population. According to one story, Farr’s injury hadn’t dissuaded the New York Giants. In their leanest years a few years back, it is told that representatives of Jim Lee Howell, the Giants’ director of player personnel, made repeated trips to the mountains (how they ever unearthed Toby escapes me!) and pleaded with Farr to let their surgeons repair him. To shore up their amusing “defense” they were going to make him a corner-back. Reportedly Farr told them to buzz off, his athletic days were done, man, done, and he was “doing well in business.” If this were true, I could visualize Toby telling them between his clinch-toothed smile. When I got to know Toby as well as one can know him, I asked him about his athletic prowess, what college? what injury? what about the Giants? Toby answered with his typical live-for-the-moment evasiveness.
“Who the fuck cares? That shit is all in the past. I never even think about it anymore.”
People said Farr seduced any woman he wanted to seduce, though whenever his name came up in mixed company, girls gagged exaggeratedly and mimicked a furious throwing up, hyperbolic theatrics which always seemed to me so strung out as to suggest that whoever Farr was, he undoubtedly was oblivious to the particular girl doing her fierce feigned puking. People said if you crossed Farr he’d kill you fucking dead, if not with one of his sawed-off shotguns, with his hands.
“Lord awmighty, one night at the Edgewood I saw him go outside with the biggest sonofabitch you ever see—a fucking lumberjack, a baby fucking whale! Farr hit the poor slob a dozen times without the gorilla ever getting his hands up. We had to take the guy’s remains down to the candy-with-the-hole-in-it hospital. The patient didn’t leave his sickbed for ten fucking days!”
People said Farr made fools of the New York State Police. They said the troopers were weary unto death of it, up to here with it, the hand knifed and slicing enthusiastically at the Adam’s apple. Supposedly a top honcho investigator in the state’s BCI office in New York City had told local troopers if they knew for certain it was Farr fleeing a crime, there wouldn’t be any need extending him the courtesy (a few stout fellow winks here, one imagines) of inviting his surrender. The troopers were to “blow Farr’s pretty fucking head off!”
People said they wouldn’t mind Farr all that much if he didn’t push dope.
“What’s the diff? He doesn’t sell to kids. In fact, he doesn’t sell to anybody he doesn’t know. He’s too cute for that. The fuzz want him for so many other things, they’d love to bust him for pushing. He’d get the maximum, for fact. And who you shittin’? You get your grass and uppers from him, don’t yuh?”
“Gawd, what a weirdo. Nobody even knows where he lives. He’s supposed to have one place right in this rinky-dink town, and nobody even knows where that is. I mean, reallyl How can anyone disappear in the goddamn Bay?”
None of these Farrs was the Toby I’d known without realizing it was indeed Farr I knew.
Whenever during the tourist season (Memorial through Labor days) I left my attic studio and the manuscript of Pages from a Cold Island, ten or fifteen bucks in my pocket, and strolled the crowded streets from bar to bar, drinking a couple beers here, a couple there, I was usually alone. Except for a year at one time, a year at another, spent teaching at local rural high schools—and I viewed these as only interim stints to stake my return to Florida—I really hadn’t lived at home for a quarter of a century, since I’d entered college in 1948. Hence I knew hardly anyone but older bar owners and fishing guides. Two or three times I observed Toby in Cavallario’s Steak House. I never saw him come in. I’d look up and he’d be standing at the far end of the bar from the end I favored. He was about thirty. I took him for a dentist or surgeon or rising young bank executive, the latter of which he was in a way. He always wore immaculately pressed basic-colored golf shirts with little alligators sewn on the pocket, extravagantly colored, neatly pressed, expensive-looking plaid golf slacks. He shod himself in equally expensive-looking Scotch-grained custom-made shoes.
Except for his very blond wavy hair parted in the middle and brushed lovingly back to the middle of his ears in the Prince Valiant pageboy style of the time, he looked astonishingly like a young Michael Caine, though, unlike
Caine’s thicker black rims, Toby favored the brown-speckled-with-yellow thin rims Ivy Leaguers wore in the fifties. There was in his countenance, for example, Caine’s sadness and irony, his cynical vulnerability, his innocent decadence, his sinister childlikeness, even his effeminacy. And yet one somehow knew, as with Caine, that he wasn’t that way and that the smug aloof bastard was doubtless devastating with women. Materializing at the far end of Cavallario’s bar, he would have a bottle of Heineken set before him without his asking, he would lift the bottle directly to his mouth, take a long cool draught as if he’d just come from doing twenty-seven holes, return the green bottle to the bar, sip slowly after that, and never drink more than two. Although from where I stood I never heard how people addressed him, everyone seemed to say hello. If he deigned to acknowledge these greetings at all, he did so with the most cursory of nods. It was as though he were returning salutations from bugs. Looking suddenly up, I’d discover he’d exited with the same silent stealth he’d entered.
To my surprise and uneasiness I one night saw him bent over in eager sibilant conversation with the bartender, Jimmy Tousant, and from that night on, to my embarrassment, he sipped at his Heineken and stared at me. Entering Cavallario’s on the July Fourth weekend, I found it so crowded I had to reach over a three-deep mass to get my Budweiser, after which I retreated and rested the small of my back against the frame of the picture window fronting on the street. Abruptly, and without again having seen him enter, not to mention fathoming how he’d got his Heineken so quickly, I sensed he was leaning against the wall right next to me. He did not turn to me.
“Somebody said you’re Exley.”
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I said I was Exley.
Still looking straight ahead and with his left hand holding the bottle he even now sipped at, he proffered his right hand palm upward for me to shake.
“I’m Toby.”
Although in his handshake there was a definite warmth and firmness, Toby did it in such a way as to suggest he was offering it up, Pope-like, to be kissed.
“You been away from home a long time.”
“Yeah, a long time.”
“I’ve read A Fan’s Notes.”
Unless one is a writer, it is difficult to comprehend with what passionate depths one comes to loathe one’s own creation. (I don’t mean to romanticize the writing racket. Most of us are simpering bohunk egomaniacal pricks just as in thrall to our advances, reviews, and royalty statements as the chairman of U.S. Steel is in thrall to the net earnings figure in his annual report.) For years I had not kept a single copy of that book within a country mile of me. Neither had I kept a single review nor letter in praise of it. Had I elected to keep a scrapbook at all, it would have been comprised of articles and letters damning the book out of hand. In the bathroom, framed and mounted on the wall next to the medicine cabinet, I did have artist James Spanfeller’s excellent dust jacket for the original Harper & Row edition. Regally seated on the throne mornings, I could stare at the purple and red psychedelic dust jacket and remind myself of how abysmally short of its conception the book had in fact fallen, pull up my Levi’s, flush my ugly wastes down the vortex, and return to my Smith Corona determined that this time out I’d consummate my vision.
My Random House editor Bob Loomis was kind enough to say only good writers sneer at and derogate themselves. Loomis said when his hacks come to town he takes them to lunch at swank restaurants, hoping that the sumptuous food and wine will distract them but that, invariably, he has to sit stupefied for three hours listening to the various levels of meaning (oh, my!) on which the hack’s book works. Before he retires, Loomis swears he’s going to sit dopily (he claims these sessions cause constipation) through one of these endlessly dreary monologues, then solemnly remove the habitual cigar or pipe from his mouth and say, “Your book doesn’t work on any level whatever, which is not to say that Newhouse and Random House don’t hope it sells a hundred million copies.” My case wasn’t so much hate as love-hate. Years before, when I’d owned a copy, I’d found that on those nights I came home drunk I invariably picked up the book, opened it to any place it happened to open, and moaned or went ahhhh. It was a kind of did-I-ever-write-that-badly?-did-I-ever-write-that-well? thing. On the night it became a continuous moan I descended the stairs, went out the back door, opened the garbage can, stood over the banana peels and discarded potato salad, tore out the book’s 385 pages, and let them flutter into the pork gravy, salvaging only Spanfeller’s dust jacket.