1968
A Note to the Reader
Though the events in this book bear similarity to those of that long malaise, my life, many of the characters and happenings are creations solely of the imagination. In such cases, I of course disclaim any responsibility for their resemblance to real people or events, which would be coincidental. The character “Patience,” for example, who is herein depicted as my “wife,” is a fictionalized character bearing no similarity to anyone living or dead. In creating such characters, I have drawn freely from the imagination and adhered only loosely to the pattern of my past life. To this extent, and for this reason, I ask to be judged as a writer of fantasy.
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If his inmost heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that dream of undying fame; which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand realities.
—NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, Fanshawe
All Wales is like this. I have a friend who writes long and entirely unprintable verses beginning, “What are you, Wales, but a tired old bitch?” and, “Wales my country, Wales my sow.”
—DYLAN THOMAS to PAMELA HANSFORD JOHNSON
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1 / The Nervous Light of Sunday
On Sunday, the eleventh of November, 196–, while sitting at the bar of the New Parrot Restaurant in my home town, Watertown, New York, awaiting the telecast of the New York Giants–Dallas Cowboys football game, I had what, at the time, I took to be a heart attack.
It wasn’t. It—the “seizure” or whatever one chooses to call it—was brought on by the high and delicious anxiety I always experienced just prior to a Giants game, and by a weekend of foodless, nearly heroic drinking. For me it was a common enough drinking; but the amounts consumed had been intensified by the news, received by mail from Scarsdale two days before, that my wife intended to divorce me and to have custody of my two-year-old twin sons. It gives me feeble comfort to report it was not a heart attack. The pain was excruciatingly vivid, and for many moments I was terrified by the fear of death. Illogically, this was one terror I believed I had long since cast off—having cast it off, I thought, with the effortless lunacy of a man putting a shotgun into his mouth and ridding himself of the back of his skull. That the fear of death still owns me is, in its way, a beginning.
Each weekend I traveled the fifty-odd miles from Glacial Falls to Watertown, where I spent Friday night and all day Saturday in some sustained whisky drinking, tapering off Sundays with a few bottles of beer at The Parrot, eyes fixed on the television screen, cheering for my team. Cheering is a paltry description. The Giants were my delight, my folly, my anodyne, my intellectual stimulation. With Huff I “stunted” up and down the room among the bar stools, preparing to “shoot the gap”; with Shofner I faked two defenders “out of their cleats,” took high, swimming passes over my right shoulder and trotted, dipsy-doodle-lie, into the end zone; with Robustelli I swept into backfields and with cruel disdain flung flat-footed, helpless quarterbacks to the turf. All this I did amidst an unceasing, pedantic commentary I issued on the character of the game, a commentary issued with the patronizing air of one who assumed those other patrons incapable of assessing what was taking place before their eyes. Never did I stop moving or talking. Certainly I drove a good many customers away. Most of those who remained had seen the show before and had come back for more, bringing with them the morbid fascination which compels one to stare at a madman.
For the Giants they were exhilarating and lovely afternoons. With Y. A. Tittle passing to Shofner, Webster, Gifford, and Walton, the team was displaying its most adroit and exciting offense in memory; I was giddy with admiration. Despite those few felicitous hours, the weekends were tedious and could as well have taken place at Glacial Falls had I not been earning my drinking money at what my colleagues, with disarming somberness, referred to as “teaching school.” It wasn’t that teachers weren’t permitted to drink in Glacial Falls, or that anyone would have frowned on a teacher’s cheering in a local saloon. My case was somewhat different. Prior to his offering me a contract, Mr. A., the superintendent, had told me, half apologetically, half menacingly, that he understood I drank heavily. I should have said, “Well, friend, if you understand that, you’d best not expose me to and run the risk of my polluting the kids”; but I badly needed the job and so found myself in the humiliating position of having to assure the man I’d refrain from “excessiveness” around Glacial Falls, a rural community of ten thousand, buried half the year under leaden skies and heavy snows, and all the year under the weight of its large and intransigent ignorance.
“The children come first,” Mr. A. said to me at the time. “You understand that. We have to protect the children at all costs.”
He said this sincerely, and I had no reason to doubt him. I wanted to believe him. For me it was another autumn, a time of new beginnings, and I was thirty-two; but I had only to teach a few days to realize the children came anything but first. The curriculum was, as it had been in the two schools where I had substituted, as bland as hominy grits; and there was a faculty that might most kindly be referred to as not altogether cretinous. A freshman had nuns cloistered in a “Beanery,” a sophomore thought the characters in Julius Caesar talked “pretty damn uppity for a bunch of Wops,” a junior defined “in mufti” as the attire worn by “some kind of sexual freak (like a certain ape who sits a few seats from me!),” and a senior considered “Hamlet a fag if I ever saw one. I mean, yak, yak, yak, instead of sticking that Claude in the gizzard, that Claude who’s doing all those smelly things to his Mom.”
Compounding the touching bewilderment of these students was an English department chairman who clung to such syntactical myths as that either different from or different than are permissible as the former is used in America and the latter in England. Though I had done some substitute work, this was my first contractual obligation, I was bringing to it a typically asinine and enthusiastic aplomb, and at this point I sought the floor. “I’ve heard this for years,” I said, “have always looked for it, and have found that most English writers use different from. Without a Fowler handy I haven’t the foggiest how this argument got started, but I suspect that some prose writer of Dean Swiftian eminence got smashed one day, inadvertently substituted than for from, and for the past two hundred years the dons at Oxford and Cambridge have been scratching their heads and picking their noses over it. But this professorial bickering has nothing to do with us. Between getting smashed and cracking up their hot rods, initiating each other into their sex clubs, and having their rumbles, these little dears are looking to us for direction”—a loud laugh here from the back of the room, issuing from a Dartmouth man who taught English and Latin—”and we ought to give it to them. Oughtn’t we to take a hard and arbitrary line and say it’s different from, period? Certainly they’ll come to us and show us how Hemingway strings together ten compound sentences without employing a single comma, but we’ll just have to tell them they ain’t Hemingway. I doubt there’s anything stifling to creativity here. If any of these kids are going to write, they’ll write in spite of us, and at least they’ll know what rules they’re violating.”
This tastelessly long-winded monologue occurred at the first department meeting in September. Thinking that the laughter of the Dartmouth man had reflected the sentiments of my colleagues, when I finished, feeling rather proud, I looked round to see how the rest of the English teachers were reacting to the witty and brilliant new addition to their staff. To a man they were glum, somewhat wretched. Immediately after the meeting I discovered why. Approached by a broad-assed, martini-swilling, brazen, and theatrical old termagant, I was informed as a teacher new to the system that one did not enter discussions at department meetings, that “talking took time,” and that there were all sorts
of places one would rather be. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought these meetings were for a purpose.”
As the year progressed I learned that due to this conspiracy of silence the department chairman was forced to carry single-handedly what were supposed to be give-and-take discussions. Knowing he was no more ignorant than those boobs seated around me patronizing him, I felt sorry for him. At the beginning of each meeting he handed to his English teachers mimeographed sheets containing lettered items, A, B, C, D, E, reflecting the wisdom of thirty years spent in combat with the language. Unsure of our ability to read (our ability to talk hadn’t encouraged him), he read each and every item to us. Beginning with a lovingly theatrical enunciation of A, he thereupon was off. Matchlessly vapid, the items were such that I remember only one of them, and that only because to this day I have no notion of what he meant by it: The best place to make out your lesson plans is at your desk. In fairness to the man, he did not feel duty-bound to the continuity of his mimeographed sheets and often interrupted his readings to impart to us some newly acquired gem. One day he told us he had come across the word apostasy but hadn’t bothered to look it up as he had no fear of encountering it again. He was implying that if an English teacher looked up every unknown word he came across, he’d spend half his waking hours poring myopically over the dictionary. Smiling, he then permitted us to nod our heads in acquiescence to his canniness. He beamed. Then he did something unforgivable. Having admitted to not comprehending a word known to most high school seniors, he suddenly chose to group his teachers within the limits of his own scant vision. “Do any of you know the meaning of the word?” he challenged. The silence was awesome. Everyone stared at the floor. I don’t know why I chose to speak. It would be the last time I ever did so at a meeting. I defined the word, trying to speak in a matter-of-fact, self-disparaging way, as though I were admitting that nobody but a fool or a freak would know the meaning of such an esoteric word. “Apostasy,” I said, “is the disavowal of previously avowed principles.” And, oh lord, my impatient, querulous, pompous voice too clearly reflected the long weeks of my anguish at these sessions. Led by the theatrical grande dame, all heads cranked round to peer in utter astonishment and loathing at me, loathing not only for having committed the gaffe of entering a discussion but for suggesting that the world wasn’t, after all, bordered by the town signs proclaiming Glacial Falls.
Though distressing, these problems seemed not invincible; and I had hopes that by going my own way I could do a good job despite my surroundings. I was wrong. In the Glacial Falls teacher’s manual, a booklet I had been assured was Biblical in its authority (chiseled in stone), I one day came across a high-toned and vague clause (very much like a paragraph in any education textbook) calling on teachers to pass with the grade of C any student who was “working to capacity”—a capacity one could, I guessed immediately, determine from the IQ records in the guidance office. With a number of seasoned teachers in the system I tried to discuss this clause, but they seemed reluctant to talk about it—more than reluctant, tired, very tired, as though the clause had been discussed all too many times. There were some obvious questions needing answers. What about the superior student who doesn’t make any effort but still manages to get a B? Reversing the principle, do I give him a C, and if I do, does that C, in the eyes of the administration, represent the same as the C of a student capable of doing only 40, 30, 20, percent of the work?
“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 school should have been teaching them all along: that even in America failure is a part of life. (At Glacial Falls the F had been eliminated altogether on the genteel assumption that the D, the—in Newspeak “unpassing” grade, somehow represented a less equivocal failure.) In the end, of course, the policy didn’t hurt the student nearly so much as the teacher: a wink eventually becomes a twitch, a twitch the sign of some inner disturbance. Still, everything had now been solved for me. I would go through the motions of teaching and try to prevent my students’ believing my contempt was leveled at them. Not succeeding, I found that by the Thanksgiving holiday the majority of my students despised me, I loathed them, and we moved warily about each other snarling like antic cats. So I went each weekend to Watertown to drink and come alive those Sunday afternoon hours before the television screen. At game’s end I returned to Glacial Falls, where during the day I continued to snarl and be snarled at, and where during the evening, in the isolation of my bleak, eight-dollar room, I fell with incredible ease into profound and lengthy sleep. Occasionally sleeping as much as fourteen hours, I rose as though great lead weights were tied to me and returned to the agitation of the classroom.
But the weeks passed with paradoxical swiftness. It was as if they were no more than prolonged slumbers burdened by nightmares populated with pimple-picking, gum-chawing, pea-brained, sex-overwhelmed adolescents. When I awoke, perspiring, I was in Watertown standing at the bar of the Crystal Restaurant, drinking a beer and looking across the bar at Leo, who was one of the owners and whom I had known since childhood. Occasionally I drank two or three before the perspiration dried and I could speak to him. Then I would say, “How the Giants going to make out Sunday, Leo?” Having known the question would come, Leo would smile. With that question life would begin again. The nightmare of the week was over.
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. In football a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out. There was nothing rhetorical or vague about it; I chose to believe that it was not unlike the jobs which all men, in some sunnier past, had been called upon to do. It smacked of something old, something traditional, something unclouded by legerdemain and subterfuge. It had that kind of power over me, drawing me back with the force of something known, scarcely remembered, elusive as integrity—perhaps it was no more than the force of a forgotten childhood. Whatever it was, I gave myself up to the Giants utterly. The recompense I gained was the feeling of being alive.
The choice of The Parrot as a place to view the games was not an arbitrary one. There had been a time, some two or three seasons before, when I had been able to bounce up and down—shouting, “Oh, God, he did it! Gifford did it! He caught the goddam thing!”—in any place, in any company, and feel neither timidity nor embarrassment. But as one year had engulfed another, and still another, each bringing with it its myriad defeats, as I had come to find myself relying on the Giants as a life-giving, an exalting force, I found myself unable to relax in the company of “unbelievers,” in the company of those who did not take their football earnestly or who thought my team something less than the One God. At those times, in those alien places, I felt like a holy man attempting to genuflect amidst a gang of drunken, babbling, mocking heretics. I tried a number of places in Watertown before settling on The Parrot; though it was not exactly the cathedral I would have wished for, it was—like certain old limestone churches scattered throughout the north country—not without its quaint charms. It was ideally isolated on a hill above the city; sitting at the bar I was seldom aware of the city’s presence, and when I was, I could think of it as a nostalgic place beneath me, a place with elm trees and church towers and bone-clean streets; sitting at the bar, the city could be thought of as a place remembered, and remembered as if from a great distance.
This distance was important to me. For a long time I had been unable to engage my home town with any degree of ope
nness. What friends I had had were married, raising families, and had locked themselves, ever so tightly, behind their neat-trimmed lawns and white clapboard houses, their children cute, their wives sexless and anxious, my friends plotting their next moves to achieve the Black River Valley Club, never asking themselves what, if they achieved that—the town’s most venerable institution—could possibly be left for them. My friends and I had long proved an embarrassment to one another; I embarrassing them because I drank too much, was unreliable in my debts and working habits, and had been “hospitalized” a number of times; I embarrassed because they were. We never stopped each other on the streets without, eyes avoiding mine, their patronizing me with queries about my health. It was distressing because there was a kind of gloating—undoubtedly a good deal imagined on my part—in these encounters, 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. After a time these encounters had proved so painful that whenever I found myself compelled to move about the streets in daylight hours, I dropped my eyes to the sidewalk and charged through the streets as though in a hot-brained hurry. A dim-lighted haven for inarticulate young men and women who arrived in the late hours of the evening and, throwing themselves together in mock couplings, struggled energetically about the dance floor to the plaintive, standard tunes rendered by a local trio, a piano, a drum, a first-rate horn, The Parrot was not a place where I feared encountering any of my “friends.” Most of these young people I knew by name or by sight, and I felt comfortable with them. They took me for what I was, a youngish-old teacher from Glacial Falls, one who drank too much and who was a little tetched on the subject of the Giants; but they seemed to like me and didn’t appear to begrudge me that I was without the desire to achieve the Black River Valley Club. Sunday afternoons were different. Then, with the music stilled and the blinds thrown open allowing the golden autumn sunlight to diffuse and warm the room, I would stand at the bar and sip my Budweiser, my “tapering-off” device; munch popcorn from wooden bowls; and in league with the bartender Freddy, whose allegiance to the Giants was only somewhat less feverish than mine, cheer my team home. Invariably and desperately I wished that the afternoon, the game, the light would never end.