In 1938, the day before President Roosevelt snipped the ceremonial ribbon opening the International Bridge spanning the Thousand Islands and uniting the U.S. with Canada, it is told, apocryphally or otherwise, that my father beat that exemplary poseur to the punch, with wire cutters severed the cable which had been strung across the bridge’s entrance to bar hoi polloi, climbed into the back seat of a convertible roadster, and had himself driven over the arcing, sky-rising span, while in imitation of F.D.R. he sat magnificently in the back seat, his jaw thrust grandly out, and, hand aflutter, bestowed his benedictions on the lovely and (one somehow imagines) startled islands.
In the way of timorous women everywhere, my mother’s life with my father was one of trepidation that some such shenanigan would eventually get him arrested, land his name on the back page of the Watertown Daily Times, and disgrace the family. The back page of our newspaper is the one Methodist ministers, old maids, and city councilmen turn to for forbidden transports; my mother viewed it as a source of eternal ruination for our local sinners; it never occurred to her that to an adult or jaded mentality such items might be viewed with tolerant or jolly sympathy; and for many years, whenever one of my acquaintances made that page, she had a distressing habit of reading the articles aloud to me, by way of object lessons. One man was arrested for drunken driving, challenged the arresting officer, and it eventually took three state policemen, using their billies, to get him into custody. “Good,” I said. “I hope he busted all three of those fascist pigs in the nose.” Another man I knew was indicted for the statutory rape of a fourteen-year-old girl. “Lovely age, fourteen,” I remarked. “Same as Romeo’s Juliet.” In a Thousand Islands restaurant, still another acquaintance expectorated into a locally prominent attorney’s spaghetti dinner. “Marvelous!” I exclaimed gleefully. “Remind me to buy that guy a drink!” That was the last object lesson my mother ever tried on me. In fairness to her, two years before my father’s death there were sibilant and awful rumors of an intemperate fist fight in a barroom involving broken noses, bits of marrow, rich red blood, and many troopers; but if the newspaper’s editors ever heard of it, in deference to my father they never printed it.
Once, when I was very small, I actually saw my father play football; but like the propagators of his legend I remember nothing about the game save that at one point in it an opposing player, whose cleats had been removed to expose the sharp steel screws that held them (a customary bit of nastiness among the old-timers), stepped on my father’s hand, tearing it rather badly. The field where the game was being played was without bleachers, and what crowd there was stood huddled behind the players’ benches, the Watertown fans behind ours and those of the opposing team across the field behind theirs. For the first time that day I was to discover that it was a crowd to which my father was very precisely attuned. My father had left the playing field and was standing bent over before our bench, holding the wrist of his right hand with his left, exposing the wound. It was a nasty, jagged tear; it bled profusely, a heavy, brilliant, crimson blood; and the trainer no sooner began pouring iodine into it than my father let out a high, fierce, almost girlish howl, one that—representing, as he did to me, the epitome of strength and courage—immediately induced in me the urge to scream in terror. But then, almost as suddenly, the substitutes on the bench, the crowd behind them, and even the trainer who was ministering to the wound were uproarious with glee, were bellowing and guffawing, slapping their thighs and pounding each other’s backs, and I saw that my father was parodying how a lesser man might react to iodine. Suspended between tears and laughter, I stood there listening to the gleeful homage of the crowd; then I, too, began to laugh, hysterically, wildly, until my father looked up at me, surprised and not a little upset, recognizing what had transpired. It was the first time the crowd had come between my father and me, and I became aware that other people understood in him qualities I did not—a knowledge that gave them certain claims on him. It is a terrifying thing to have a wedge driven into one’s narrow circle of love.
In later years I was, of course, to become very aware of this wedge, and to learn to despise it, particularly on brilliant autumn Saturdays. Hand in hand, on those fall mornings, we strolled about the Public Square, ostensibly “on errands”; but the nature of these errands was vague (I don’t ever remember bearing home for lunch so much as a lettuce head) and more of a leisurely ceremonial, the supernumerary method through which my father assured himself of his continuing fable. We could not go a hundred feet without being accosted by all manner of men. My father talked with the town elders and the town dregs, with pompous counselors and their least estimable clients, and as likely as not these men revealed to him things of the most distressingly intimate nature. My father was, surprisingly, a listener. He had a way of tilting his head plaintively to one side and pursing his lips in a solemn, commiserating way; he always looked directly at his confessors. A baroque fountain commanded the grassy, tree-shaded island at the center of the square; confronted with the contemplative, strong, open, and sympathetic face of my father, men seemed to hurl their fastidiousness, as the fountain did its spray, into the air; and with no furtiveness whatever made public exposure of deluded passions, heartfelt betrayals, and timid sins. Though not an educated man, my father was a man of mercurial intelligence. If he believed the grief to be of a passing nature, he took the man’s story and reworded it in a droll way that often left the mourner in helpless and profoundly grateful laughter. On the other hand, he had a singular, unnerving habit with those men past articulating their petulance, their rage, their sorrow. Grotesque, crooked, repulsive, wasted, pitiably drunk, they looked through watery-red eyes and jabbered away in what, to me, might just as well have been Zulu. With his free hand, my father always touched these men. Listening as deferentially as ever he listened to the Mayor, my father gripped them tightly on the upper arm, patted them affectionately on the back, occasionally even put his muscular arm about their bent, emaciated shoulders. Whenever he talked to these men, i always squeezed his free hand fiercely and looked over my shoulder to see if anyone was watching us. One day my father asked me if I was ashamed to have him talk with these men. The question came unexpectedly, and I stammered, “No! No!” But when I looked up at my father, I saw that he knew otherwise, and that he was sad.
It was in the afternoon at the Fair Grounds, where the high school played their games, that my father’s autumn Saturdays reached a kind of culmination. He never—or so it seems to me now—paid to go anyplace. Doors opened before his growing legend, and through the one into the high school games he took not only himself and me but every scrawny-kneed, mattyhaired, nose-running, jug-eared, obscenity-prone kid in town, boys orphaned by a depression that had left them without the price of their dignity. We never stepped onto the grounds without being surrounded by a multitude of these boys, and there always ensued a scene my father loved, though in its way it was a small-town and grotesque parody of the public figure. “Hey, Ex!” they bellowed in beseechment. “Hey, Ex! Hey! How ‘bout gettin’ us in? Hey! Would cha?” My father teased. He wasn’t certain. He would have to think about it. Folding his arms on his chest and tilting his head in the way he had, he surveyed them. On tiptoes, mouths agape, they were a strikingly comical picture of impatience (comical to - me now: they seemed then lamentable). They knew my father was going to take them in. Now was no time for teasing. The game’s imminence was in the atmosphere; and from across the way, behind the pale-orange stands, one could hear the gradually rising roar of the crowd signaling the kickoff. Now they jiggled about in something like anger—as they had a right to do; they were subjected to this chafing every week. Always at this point my father dropped his arms to his sides, lifted his head,. smiled, said, “Okay! Let’s go!” and “Don’t forget: tell the man at the gate you’re my sons!” “We know!” they shouted. We know all about it!” Then I joined the group, indistin, guishable from all the rest. Leading my father who trotted behind us, we broke into a furious run toward th
e gate. The gateman was both moody and deferential, like a culturally inclined manservant. Moments before he had unquestionably been kicking these boys in the ass for trying to sneak in, and he had now to undergo his weekly humiliation. “These are all my boys!” came my father’s voice from behind us. The gateman smiled weakly, grudgingly, and stepped aside as we crushed our way through the narrow entrance. One of the boys, safely inside, invariably shouted back at him: “Yeah! Earl’s my ol’ man, yuh fucking rat!” I never heard that de claimer without the blood rushing to my face. And not because of the obscenity.
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. There were, that summer in New York, other things I longed for. I wanted the wealth and the power that fame would bring; and finally, I wanted love—or said that I did, though I know now that what I wanted was the adulation of the crowd, and that love was just a word that crowded so many other, more appropriate words off the tongue. Having no precise idea how to achieve these things, I told myself I would one day write The Big Book; but I can understand now that I never believed I would. At college I had written only one story—”A Portrait of Constriction”—which possessed any merit whatever, and this but a tentative feeling for the language. Aside from this grievously asinine tale—its first line was: “I am a spider without filament; I extend to no place”—my literary efforts ran from soggy-soda-cracker sentimentality to worse, and those professors who were kind to those efforts would have been kinder to inform me I had neither the talent, ambition, nor syntax to write even a bad book. In Liebling’s phrase, I could not “write for free seeds.” Knowing nothing about writing, I had no trouble seeing myself famous. If, according to a reviewer, So-and-So had written a “masterpiece,” I quite facilely imagined myself as So-and-So. “Frederick Exley,” I read over the review, “has written a masterpiece”; then I smiled pleasurably as, in the imperative yet chummy style of so many reviewers, half counseling, half admonishing, the astute critic added, “You’d better read it.
This dubious fame would have to wait until some future time. First I would get a splendid job in public relations or advertising, rent an apartment, and begin lining the walls with the shelves to hold my books. For that apartment I would also get a girl. I once had a very clear picture of her: she was to have a degree from Vassar (I was willing to go as low as a B.A. in Fine Arts from Wellesley); she must have bobbed, blond hair, green eyes, and golden, vibrant legs; to offset my increasing “melancholy,” I determined that she must be a gregarious girl, spontaneously witty, and capable of thunderous laughter; still, apart from this delightfully fresh façade, I conceived her adept in the most “enlightened” sexual acts. She was to allay the ache ir my heart, and when the ache disappeared and contentment reigned, I would get down to the distressing chore of acquiring Genius. I believed this, too; none of my professors, talking about books in their even, slightly somber tones, had bothered to tell me that literature is born out of the very longing I was so seeking to repress.
The ache stayed, the Vassar-bred nymph never materialized, and the bookish apartment turned out to be free room and chow at the house of an aunt (a widowed schoolteacher) in upper Westchester. It was a compromise with my fantasies which still amazes me, for few young men have come to New York better armed to conquer the city than I. It was a compromise which might never have been necessary had I not, one scalding June day, bestowed on New York City a quality it may or may not possess—magnanimity.
My chums at USC were, like me, outcasts: poker and horse players, drunken veterans, petulant instructors, would-be novelists, homosexuals, talentless poets, an occasional Negro, all the patrons of an off-campus bistro on Jefferson Boulevard. There a few weeks before my graduation, in league with some friends of mine, a Negro homosexual and his beloved, a frail, brilliant, and gentle blond boy (a psychology major, naturally), a new Frederick Exley capable of storming the high and indifferent towers of Manhattan was created. Because our preparations were absolute in their abominable cynicism, we must have felt those towers not only indifferent but nigh invincible. Setting a pitcher of beer (one we kept full throughout the long afternoon) on the table with a stack of white-lined paper, sharpened pencils, and a job-hunting tome entitled Go Get the Job You Want!, we conspired on a creation that severely indicted either us or that world we were seeking to impress.
I haven’t a copy of the résumé or covering letter we fashioned that afternoon, but I remember enough of the résumé so that thinking of it even now forces the blood to my face and arouses a giddiness in me. Most of it was created by my friends, facts assembled, put down, and rewritten in an exhilarating zealousness that swung them, pendulum-like, between violent laughter and spitting bitterness, that even caused between them arguments over what and what not to include. It was a bitterness enhanced by the tacit but real knowledge that, being what they were (and they were very gay), they could never hope to enter the world whose door I was trying to unlatch, an exclusion that only whetted their desire to force themselves, through me, into that world. At the top of the résumé, under “Personal Data,” we listed my name, age, and address, and from that point on anything resembling truth, save for “Race: Caucasian” (which, of course, was included on the Negro’s squealing insistence: “You’se a white man, Freddy boy!”), was purely fortuitous. We listed as my religion “Episcopalian” (“All the shits are Episcopalian!” the blond said), as my birthplace “London, England,” my nationality as “English-American” (whatever in the world that might be). We listed with little regard for truth my “Courses of Study and Grades Received,” and following the pattern of résumés as set forth by the job-hunting wizard, we created a heading called “Extracurricular Activities and Academic Distinctions Received.” It was under this sweeping banner that the résumé reached its peripheral absurdity: Sigma Chi Fraternity, vice president and social chairman (I was never in the place); Sigma Tau Delta, national English honorary society (I didn’t know there was such an organization till the Negro included it and explained to me what it was); football, ‘51, ‘52 (at USC? Brother! ); literary critic for The Daily Trojan (for this newspaper I straight-facedly reported one story about a USC alumnus who, having published a book about his escape from the bondage of booze, was arrested in downtown Los Angeles for disorderly conduct and public intoxication; the editor read it, laughed, said he daren’t print it: I quit); editor of Wampus, the college humor magazine (there was such a sheet, but its mirth was never in evidence); president of Scribes Creative Writing Club (at USC there was no such presumption) ; and recording secretary of the USC Young Republican Club (I am not now, sir, nor ever have been a young or an old Republican). Under the final heading, “Hobbies and Outside Interests,” we listed everything from Elizabethan Drama to golf to Renaissance Art to sailing to Early American Antiques, trying to convey the image of an indescribably well-rounded and right-thinking young man; we did so by alternating one lower-case piece of Americana with one uppercase intellectual pretension, skin-diving with Linguistics.
Of the covering letter created that day I remember only the first two lines: “How does one get into this business? I have asked myself that question a hundred times.” It was, I do remember, composed with great fastidiousness, its tone was numbingly earnest, and its contents were just asinine enough to draw forty-odd replies from the sixty or so I mailed out to public relations and advertising firms. About half of these replies were from men who would “be delighted to chat” with me about the possibilities at
One scalding June morning a month later, I found myself walking up Park Avenue on my way to the first of these chats when suddenly, altogether unexpectedly, I felt a twinge of panic. Stopping, I pulled under the awning of a store front, out of the sun. Even prior to this, I had experienced another kind of panic. A few days before leaving Los Angeles, as part of my program to assault t
he big town, I had purchased a new suit—the only one I owned. Out there the suit had seemed completely right, but I had only to walk two blocks up Park Avenue and watch the men nod approvingly at each other’s snug-shouldered splendor (New York is the only city in the country where I have noticed this peculiar effeminacy) to see that it was unequivocally wrong, nearly disastrous. It was steelgray—in the bright sun it had sheen—and California-cut, with those wide, dandified lapels that run all the way down to one’s belly before a button can be detected; it had those monstrously padded shoulders, making my neck appear a lily shoot rising from a pile of papier-mâché boulders. Its effect was unalterably wrong, and I was walking along smarting somewhat from this sartorial deficiency when, as I say, I suddenly experienced something more provocatively wrong. I stopped because for the first time it occurred to me that certain false information in the résumé might elicit from the interviewer questions I wasn’t prepared to answer. Thus I removed a copy of it from my shiny new attaché case and started studying it. That was as close to the interview as I ever got, as close to that or any of the interviews my friends had worked so passionately to get me. For suddenly I saw my father as I had seen him last. Perhaps to the question, “Born in London I see, Fred?” I was suavely responding, “Yes, chap, Pops was with our Embassy there; of course, we left London when I was only two, so I, heh, heh, heh, don’t remember too much—” Whatever, it must have concerned my father, for he rose before me as I had seen him last—in his casket.