Of course I never finished the book. When the writing was going well, I had lived in a perverse rapture from which it sometimes took hours to unwind. As a result, Patience had reluctantly been giving me three or four dollars daily with which, after a day at the writing table, I could drive to White Plains, go to Sam’s, drink beer, and wait for the dreadful exhilaration to subside. As long as the book went well all was splendid. But then the bad time set in, the time when, unable to avoid it any longer (how many words had I then? five hundred thousand?), I had to tackle that mountain of manuscript and tie together all the “pain” and the “joy” and the “anguish” I had so facilely slapped on paper. And to my horror (for I had read the books which by now all but crowded us out of the apartment) 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. More vexing still, whenever I went back to those books to see how other and better men (I went to E. M. Forster and Flaubert and Scott Fitzgerald) had worked it out, I discovered I couldn’t concentrate for ten seconds at a time. Whether this was from being still absorbed in my own work or from having exhausted myself in getting it all down, I don’t know, but my powers of concentration had ceased to exist. Thus it was that almost overnight I went from uncontrollable rapture to black despair; and Patience, detecting this and knowing what it forbode, cut off my beer money and I now lay on the davenport, stared at the ceiling, and waited to be miraculously graced with a sense of shape, occasionally filching from Patience’s purse enough money to go to Sam’s and get drunk. Unhappily, I filched too much one night, got drunk on vodka, came home, and with bleary eyes read through the entire manuscript. I am sure now that I remember that manuscript more kindly than it deserves. Some of it seemed relevant, some quite good, some of it may even have been—I was about to say art, and that would never do. What there was in places was a rhetorical though high-blown eloquence. Having put it down with furious rapidity, I detected places where in a whirlwind of creation I had achieved a certain grace, that eloquence which, according to Mann out of Cicero, resides in the motus animi continuus of composition. Twelve hours reading it, from first to last I read in pain and embarrassment. On finishing, with great and solemn ceremony I gathered it into my arms, walked out the door and down into the basement, where I flung it, with the rest of the garbage, into the blast incinerator. Then I went back to the apartment, lay down on the bed next to Patience, and wept stormily. It was a year of the hardest work I had ever done, a year which for output, if nothing else, I knew I would never again equal. I burned it because on every page I had discovered I loathed the America I knew. A long time before in that private hospital I had learned that 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.
The book’s going bad and the puerile and sacrificial burning of it proved my undoing. Not only did I again begin drinking to excess, but save for those Sunday afternoons at Fitzgerald’s I had nothing now to sustain me, and lying on the
davenport and staring at the ceiling was only able to bring into my ken the most limited of fantasies, say, that of being gain fully employed at a factory, and only this by dint of exorbitant mental strain and for but a few seconds at a time. After lying thus for two weeks, I knew that the men in the white jackets were once again imminent; but try as I would I could not summon the strength to get up, pack a bag, and go away from that place—where the typewriter keys were now gathering dust—before they came after me. 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.
It happened quite simply. One day at Prudence’s I found myself alone on the sun porch with them. They were in then-play pen, and hardly conscious of it I was staring at them in the most exasperated way (since burning the manuscript, I no longer found it necessary to play the game even at Prudence’s), when to my astonishment (for my sons had grown to the point of assuming personalities) I noticed that they were staring back at me with an equal, if not more formidable, exasperation. Though countless times I had been told that they had been manufactured in my image—”Oooooh, don’t they look like their daddy!”—I had never particularly noticed it, or if I had, I had ignored the resemblance. Looking at them now, I might, I thought, be looking into a cracked, double-image educing mirror. Both owned the slightly affected, contemplative turn of the head, the same snub noses, the same pouting impatience. Abruptly I started to laugh, loudly and raucously. For many days I had been dreaming of fleeing, imagining how Patience would have me brought back, would forgive me, and would let me lie on the davenport for a few more months. In my heart I knew she wouldn’t. She had too much character and financial independence for that. But it was pleasant to imagine her doing so. I was laughing because by one of those quick leaps of the mind I now saw myself, having been found and brought before a judge on a nonsupport charge, beaming innocently at him and saying, “They ain’t my sons, your honor,” while my sons, their diapers down around their knees, kept yapping, “He ain’t our old man, neither!”— after which the incredulous judge, looking from me to them, from them to me, finally said to the bailiff, “Lock these crazy bastards up!” As I laughed, nearly hysterical now, the boys suddenly caught up the feeling of it and laughed, too; so that we laughed together, gleefully and uncontrollably, as though they, too, were conscious of the joke. Rising, I walked to the play pen, took them up into my arms, and we had for the first time, and after so many months, made contact.
That contact proved distressfully unsettling. During the week I now lay on the davenport as moon-struck as any teen ager, thinking of them constantly and yearning for some great miracle or tragedy which would spur me from my slumber and get me up and out of there. Once out, I knew (as did Patience, though she never said so; indeed, by then we had stopped making contact altogether) that my sons could come and stay with their mother where they belonged, a place to which they could not come as long as there was a possibility of my once again climbing the walls. To the point of prayer I yearned for something to happen, longed so desperately that after a time I came to live with a terrible sense of foreboding, knowing finally that something was going to happen.
In those weeks Gifford and the Giants were all that sustained me, and I lived only from Sunday afternoon to Sunday afternoon. And though I did not know that the tragedy would be Gifford’s injury and that I would in effect be deprived of my last prop, watching his painfully troubled play I had begun to think that it would be. It was at this moment that J., a friend since boyhood and an attorney in Watertown, telephoned me from out of the northern mists of my childhood
and volunteered to treat me to a football game. It wasn’t specifically mentioned that he would be host and I guest, but it was understood in a tacit way. 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. When I telephoned J. collect, out of embarrassment I was no longer able to offer him the explanations which had been lies in any event: money for books, for job-hunting expenses, for Christmas presents. The lies had pained him as much as me, and because they weren’t in the least necessary I had acquired the disarmingly blunt habit of shouting into the receiver, “Hello, J.? Fred! Send me twenty-five, will yuh?” And he had sent it. The main thing was not to mention what we both knew: that the money was going for liquor. 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. But being a friend of my Youth he could no more deny me than he could deny nourishment to his body.
When we were adolescents (I stayed that way much longer than he), J. and I had formed, without ever bother
ing to give utterance to our motives, a conspiracy against exclusiveness, one that stayed with us—no doubt an attempt to stay youth itself—well into adulthood. We conspired against doors marked Private and No Admittance and Sold Out and Restricted Area, and though I can’t speak for J., I think I under stood my own motives. With an instinctive cynicism I knew that behind those doors there would be nothing particularly glittering or brilliant or profound, and that if one didn’t make “getting in” a contest of the wills, having once gained the other side of the door, one would sense no achievement whatever. Over the years the conspiracy had required ingenuity and dishonesty, cunning and wit, self-effacement and brashness on our part; but we had got into ball games and plays, parties and conventions—all sorts of conclaves which had proclaimed their exclusiveness for so long that did one not know better one might assume that those on the other side of the door were creatures apart, somehow more blest than other men. For this reason I shouldn’t have been surprised when, driving down the parkway on Saturday afternoon, and having just asked him in what section of the stadium our tickets were,
J. responded that he had no tickets. I shouldn’t have been surprised; but I was, terribly so, and that surprise ran quickly to anger and despondency. “Jesus Christ, J.,” I moaned, “the game’s been sold out for weeks. How the hell—” But J. interrupted me with a chuckle of surprise at what he deemed my new-found sense of propriety. He asked rhetorically, “Haven’t we always got in?” Then he laughed again, trying to enlist me in the spirit of the thing. But the spirit eluded me, and I became tense and depressed. The game was going to require that wit and that cunning, neither of which I now possessed. I had been wasting away amidst the musty dust of books, seeking to put the past down on paper, and for month on month had lived my life scarcely ever venturing from either the safety of the hospital or the haven of the apartment. Having by now taken to closing the blinds in the apartment, I was living a life in which even the sunshine reached me obliquely, through the windows of the car or not at all. Not only was I incapable of entering the taxing game to which J. now bid me; as the car approached the city, I was made terribly nervous by the increasing traffic, which now whizzed by on either side and had me looking apprehensively right and left over my shoulders, frantically, as though my head sat on a turnstile. By the time we reached Manhattan, I was in such need of a drink—and, more important than a drink, of familiar surroundings—that I almost shrieked, “Park the car on Third Avenue and we’ll go to Clarke’s!”
We got the tickets from the Giants’ quarterback Charley Conerly. We did not get them easily or for some time, until after I had been spurred into the game by J. It was nothing he said to me. It was something his eyes told me. In the process they unfortunately told me a good deal more, something I almost wasn’t up to hearing. On arriving at Clarke’s and detecting my nervous state—that at least momentarily I wasn’t up to helping him—J. gave me five dollars to drink beer, removed his bulging pocket secretary from his inside jacket pocket, and asked the bartender for two dollars’ worth of dimes. Looking at the swollen secretary made me smile. Containing the names of people who knew the brother-in-law of one of the players, or who had been in the service with one of the coaches, or who were said to be boozing companions of the ticket manager, or who were simply people whose station was so exalted that they, or it was said that they, could get in any place, any time, the wallet held names and telephone numbers J. had accumulated over the past months, the equipment, as it were, of our conspiracy. I knew the odds all too well. Half of these people wouldn’t even know what J. was talking about; and the other half, the vain ones, rather than admit their influence to be no greater than the next man’s, would suggest the wildest alternatives, everything from going to Times Square and looking for a fat man in a black silk suit with a white carnation in his lapel to calling a mysterious, unlisted phone number in Las Vegas. Some one or two would offer valid advice, hold out definite hope of tickets, and it was for these one or two that one’s ear, like a radar, had to be finely attuned. Though I smiled, I felt altogether incapable of these shenanigans; and for the next hour, while on the telephone J. cajoled and threatened, flattered and beseeched, contrived and made jokes, I stood at the bar drinking, conscious that the surroundings were not after all familiar, and that I did not feel easy in Clarke’s.
In the years since I had last been there the price of beer had risen from fifteen to a preposterous fifty cents a glass, and like most drinkers I felt a heavy distress at being in a bar where with five dollars I did not have enough to get a glow on. “Who the hell are these people kidding?” I sneeringly asked myself. That sneer encompassed my entire surroundings. The decor of the room, which I had once thought so very English, now seemed merely dingy. In the back a great, barnlike dining room had been added; and with a different kind of luck, I thought, the customers would have scurried to some other place in search of the intimacy that had been sacrificed to the expansion. Feeling cold and hostile, I was standing there wondering why Clarke’s, having almost totally changed the face it presented to the public, should be lucky enough to survive, when I noticed the bartender, he noticed me, and in a vague way I thought I understood. The bartender was my chum from the long ago—he who had been caught in the middle the night the blonde’s date, whacking away at the bar with his effeminate hand, had demanded my expulsion from the human race. Recognizing each other simultaneously, we did not speak; but our heads nodded in recognition of each other. In its way that nodding was a thousand times more eloquent than anything we might have said. “You look older,” his nod seemed to say. “You do, too,” said mine. “And how did those years go?” his head asked; to which mine replied, “Look at me—you can see.” “Yeah, I can see.” It was this nodding, this tacit 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. And save for one or two perennial adolescents the people who came there now were not those we had brushed shoulders with and hence did not know what the place had been. But the bartender and I knew. And so knowing, we had an amiable warmth pass between us. Ordering a shot, I drank it off; then I ordered another. He did not take the money for this second one; and when I drank it abruptly off, he refilled the glass. Again he didn’t take the money, and his nod seemed to say, “It’s that bad, huh?” In acknowledgment, I nodded that it was.
All this time J. had been drifting between the phone booth and the bar, filling me in on his progress. So caught up in my own “conversation,” I had nodded only cursorily and didn’t really think of him again until, detecting that I was about out of money, I asked for more. He met the request with such a look of surprise that my eyes fled immediately to the clock. To my surprise, I discovered I had gone through the five dollars in an hour’s time. Attempting to keep condescension from his voice, the tone of adult speaking to child, and introducing that element of false joviality with which people often approach drunks, J. reminded me that the night was young and that we had hours to do the town. This was news of which I was aware and which I met by putting on my face the base, pouting, and churlish grimace of the alcoholic denied. Seeing this, J. suddenly became silent, cutting himself off in mid-lecture, and laid ten dollars on the bar. His eyes were squinted in an agony of apprehension, an unequivocal disappointment no longer muddied by false hopes for me. It was the simple, un adulterated disappointment that signaled the end of the game for me, that told me the final whistle had blown and I wasn’t going to get the ball again. What I saw in his eyes struck me mute, crushed me, terrified me! Oh, I had borne the grievous eyes of family and acquaintances, of Patience and Prudence; 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. Having seen my abasement, that I groveled and had ceased to struggle, unwittingly J. had hurt me terribly. My first impulse —as it always is with the alcoholic—was to hurt him back. Seeking r
oom enough for my grief, I wanted to flee out into the night, leaving the ten dollars on the bar—imagining that J. would spend his entire weekend worrying about me. But I rejected that, thinking of still a hundred other ways to hurt him, rejecting them all in turn as lacking subtlety. By that time, unfortunately, I had already put a considerable dent in the ten dollars. Finally, by luck, through the deep, devious waters of the drunk’s mind, there arose the obvious question: why hurt him at all? He was right—God, yes, he was right! Accepting this, I, too, got some dimes, slid them into my pocket, and walked to the other phone booth, in the dining room.
Tentatively, shyly, I began dialing. Whereas I might have just emerged from a Trappist monastery, this game seemed a dreadfully secular business. I called people I hadn’t talked with in years; though they offered no comfort in the way of tickets, they seemed rather pleased to hear from me. One of them jocularly said, “How much yuh need?” Another said, “Why, Exley, you dip-shitty old bastard—/ thought you’d be dead.” He then invited me up to his Riverside Drive apartment to get drunk with him; but in the background his wife groaned loudly and achingly and distinctly said, “Oh, no—not that crazy bastard!” That he might join me for a drink, he then tried to find out where I was. But I refused to tell him and said good-bye by saying, “Tell that witch you’re married to that she ought to douche out her rancid soul.” With each call I became more obnoxiously persuasive, and through sheer balls I finally got through to Charley Conerly at his hotel. Feeling unable to handle it, I got J. and had him talk to Conerly. The conversation was a long one, and other than Conerly’s agreeing to leave two tickets for us at Booth of the stadium and the fact of our (for I had my head stuck inside the booth) being as giddy as two teen-agers in contact with a cinema star, I remember only that Conerly had the gift of granting one ease. When he began the conversation, J.’s voice had been hurried and nervous, the way one’s voice is with the famous. But by the end of the conversation J.’s voice had become modulated and easy. Whatever it was he said to J., Conerly succeeded in putting him at his ease, a gift not all of the famous are said to have. Describing to him the change in his voice as the conversation had proceeded, I later asked J. what Conerly had said to him. J. couldn’t remember anything specific, saying only, “He was a good guy—you could tell that.”