As Dr. D. was to remind me in the emergency room of the hospital so many years later, my father was “tough.” He was not a big man, standing five feet, nine or ten; but over that height was spread a solid one hundred and eighty-five pounds, a weight that he carried on hard, heavy, and lightning-quick legs, walking with the precise, pigeon-toed, and slightly affected steps of so many athletes. He supported his family by climbing telephone poles for the Niagara Mohawk (until he was fired for fighting); and when I think of him now, I think of rough-cotton work shirts open at the collar, a broad masculine face made ruddy by exposure, and a Camel cigarette dangling from the corner of his pensive mouth. There was nothing about him that did not suggest his complete awareness that he got his bread by the sweat of his brow and the power of his back. He seemed almost the prototype of the plebeian. Yet my father had more refined dreams. Like most athletes he lived amidst the large deeds and ephemeral glories of the past, recalling a time when it must have seemed to him he had been more Elevated, and this continual and melancholy look into the past had drawn his brows into a knot, giving him a look of unmistakable hostility. Moreover, in an attempt to more vividly re-create that past, my father drank—I was about to say too much, which would not be entirely accurate. My father could not, or so my mother recalls, drink even the most limited amounts of beer without becoming moody, argumentative, and even violent; and on one occasion he beat a man so badly that the man had to have pulled what few teeth my father left him.
The man himself told me the story many years after my father’s death. He was drunk and he bore my father no grudge. He implied that it had been his own fault. He said, “I wanna see your ol’ man was tough as said”; here he smiled the remorseful, tolerant smile with which one views youth’s intemperance. “He was,” he said. The man seemed to look on his dentures as a kind of trophy and kept calling them “Earl Exley’s teeth.” At one point he removed the plates from his mouth and laid them on the bar, beaming a drunken smile through elastic lips. Looking at the teeth, I was struck with the notion that they were not real false teeth at all but one of those vulgar novelty toys, and I expected that at any moment they might begin chattering away in a terrible chopping motion as they started moving down the beer-stained bar. I excused myself, told the man I was happy to have made his acquaintance, and left him staring affectionately at Earl Exley’s teeth.
In death, my father was another matter. He was, of course, tough no more. The lung cancer had done its job superbly; where he had once seemed to epitomize the plebeian, he might, in death, have been a patrician, perhaps a great poet who had died young. Outwardly calm, he looked as if he had been consumed by his vision, a wraithlike votary rendered dumb with excess of knowledge. But I was unable to sustain such images. He weighed seventy-nine pounds, and in one of those unforgivable jests we permit that profession to make on our corpses, the undertaker had removed the fixed and melancholy scowl; this, together with the wasted body, the carmine rouge and lipstick, and the heavy, sensual odor of moribund roses, conspired to gravely compromise his manhood. There was nothing here to suggest the interminable, anguishing months of his dying, an anguish that in its later stages reached such a peak that a young doctor, in a fit of impotent pique, had had to strike my father across the face. I don’t blame the man. My father had reached the point where maximum amounts of morphine no longer afforded comfort, and I suppose that the novice, terrified by his inability any longer to minister to my father’s unearthly pleas for calm, had struck out, not at my father but at his own ignorance. Still, it was quite a while before I understood and forgave. For years I harbored the secret yearning to seek out that surgeon, to knock him down, and to kick his teeth through the back of his skull.
No, now there was nothing to suggest either the kind of man my father had been or the life he had led. In death he carried with him the aristocratic nicety of drawing rooms, the inane chatter of teacups. At St. Paul’s church, a stranger in a profound-blue, rigidly cut, and expensive-looking suit wailed for all of us. His eyes were protected by great, green shades, from under which poured rivulets of shiny tears; once or twice there issued from him, amidst his crushing, incessant sobbing, an animal-like, tortured sound so terrible that provincial heads cranked themselves about, bringing every eye in that crowded chapel to him, eyes that made no more impression on him than a soft, beneficent rain. No one knew who he was. But afterward there was much surmise; and it was finally decided, against any evidence to the contrary, that he had been a boyhood friend of my father, one who was said to have “gone away young” and become a Prince of Industry.
That was how I remembered my father that June day on Park Avenue, while I stood in the shade of the awning—stood naked and stony with shame. On my father’s death, and even that day on Park Avenue, I had not known whether I loved him or not, whether he was the Earl Exley who “beat up on” people or the man whose strong hands went out to the dregs of this world. I was younger then and wanted to apprehend the world in terms of thrust and parry, of point and counterpoint, and could not see that he was both men and that in order to live successfully I would have to love both. Had such a thing happened today, I know I could have gone through with the interview, fake, suave father and all. My father was not without his subtlety and his humor, and I know he would have got rather a kick out of the whole business. But the denial of one’s father, in whatever spirit, requires great sympathy between the denier and the denied, and this my father and I had never had.
How long I stood glued in abasement to the store front I don’t know, perhaps an hour, perhaps only moments; but eventually I began to walk, at first tentatively, like an invalid just liberated from the sedentary months of his sickbed, taking one precious step and then another until, by a truly enormous effort of will, there came into my step the spirited scrupulosity of a man knowing exactly what he is about. I spent most of that torpid, shimmering day walking, frequently stopping at corner saloons to sip pensively on draft beer. Very late in the afternoon, for no reason I can think of, I took a ferry to New Jersey, went to a saloon, drank a half-dozen beers, and headed back. It was coming back that I saw the city for the first time. Standing in the tuglike prow, while the cool spray of the Hudson mingled with the sunshine, I looked up through the mist of heat and water and saw, to my astonishment, not many towers but one august pillar of gold. Its golden shadow on the water was like an arm stretched forth in benediction, promising that it would deny me nothing. Hans Christian Andersen came to mind: I saw him come fresh from Odense in his ill-fitting confirmation suit, looking for the first time at the wonder of Copenhagen. Thinking thus of him, I made one of those wild, regrettable vows to which youth are prone: I vowed that those things, literary fame et al., would come to me—and come to me on my own terms. What had I to do with fake fathers, with artifice and legerdemain? The city commanded me to stay, and in obeisance I did in my mind’s eye reach out and offer up my hand. It was at that moment I granted the city magnanimity.
After that unnerving day my approach to the job market took a new tack. My knowledge of the advertising–public relations world had been culled from lightheaded novels and nonsensical movies, especially The Hucksters starring the late and peerless Mr. Gable. Recalling how a nattily pin-striped Clark, after blowing his last fifty dollars on a hand-painted four-in-hand, had walked casually into a superbly appointed advertising agency and complacently announced that for “twenty-five thousand per” he would permit himself to be considered for employment, I derived the grandiloquently absurd notion that the way to fame and fortune in New York lay in playing it cool. I became The Cool Man, though there were of necessity certain differences between Gable’s approach and mine. Where in the movie Gable had been an advertising man, I was—well, a Poet, and, determined to remain glued to this vision of myself, I began a round of interviews in which I attempted to convey to prospective employers that on the far side of their desks Genius resided, that I considered both them and advertising to be monumental frauds, but that, in exchange for certain sums
of money (say, ten thousand a year), I would use that genius to sell cornflakes. It was to be a kind of Mephistophelean pact in which they would pay me until that time when the apartment and the Vassar blonde materialized, and I could get down to the business of realizing my talent. Where, in scene after scene of the movie, Gable had been resplendent in pin stripes, charcoal grays, and midnight blues, I had only one shiny suit, which now became perfect for my purposes—just hideous enough to keep me hopelessly removed from the world of my interviewer. Where for character Gable had his famous mustache, I bought a Yello-Bole which, stuck in my teeth, gave me, I thought, a properly ruminative air. Finally, for the coup de grace, I substituted for Gable’s striking Homburg a coiffure modeled after an idol of the moment, Truman Capote; though I had then no knowledge of that writer’s appreciable talents, I knew that, like me, he was young, and that, as I hoped to be, he was famous. Simply by my neglecting to comb it, my hair now cascaded down my forehead in piquant little bangs. Thus attired, my pipe between my teeth, my hair in a state of wondrous disarray, I was ready to suggest to the communications industry that it was in the presence of Genius.
The interviews themselves? Ah, well, all this happened fifteen years ago, and even now, at the oddest moments, taking a shower or patting a stray dog, I will suddenly remember, hardly knowing whether to thunder with laughter or hide my head under a pillow. If I was kept waiting beyond a carefully scrutinized five minutes, there was no interview! Rising from my chair and ambling over to the man’s secretary, I would bow ever so slightly, the very image of genteel breeding; then suddenly, bringing myself up to a dictatorially rigid posture, I would proclaim, my tone controlled but testy: “I’m sorry, young lady, but will you tell your employer that Mr. Exley had other commitments and couldn’t wait. If he wishes to set up another appointment and begin it at the—ah—designated time” —I would be looking at my empty wrist as though it contained a hundred-jewel job—”then he knows where to reach me.” Clicking my heels slightly and smiling my distant smile, I would depart, saying, “Adieu, my dear, adieu,” terribly certain I had rendered the girl sexually tractable. To those luckless men more disposed to life’s proprieties, those who began the interview on time, I didn’t so much walk as drift—I was absolutely wispy—into their carpeted offices where, into their outstretched and eager glad-hands, I would lay a hand as limp and clammy as a dishrag, quite as though I expected them to kiss it! Then, surveying the room with a distastefully arch expression which found the appointments irreparably vulgar, I would fling myself into a chair, stick my Yello-Bole into my jaw, and to their preliminary and “ice-breaking” questions begin issuing a sequence of noises not unlike hog noises.
Their questions ran pretty much to a pattern, and for them I had stock replies. If I was asked if I thought I could sell chocolate bars, I always answered in the most negative of ways, saying, “I haven’t the foggiest idea.” Then I would smile my smile as though to add, “But, of course, my dear, you can see that I’m a genius; and I’m certain we can work out some satisfactory arrangement wherein I will try to sell your imbecilic peanut brittle.” Only once during these interviews did I rise out of my shrieking indifference; it was to a question which, after a number of interviews, I knew would invariably be asked.
“Why do you want to work for HKI & W?”
To this preposterous assumption I would come up icily in my chair, fix the interviewer with a deadly menacing gaze—he might have just swatted me right across the face with his desk lamp—and snap, “I’m not at all sure I want to work for HKI & W. Just suppose you tell me why I should want to work for HKI & W.”
More often that not, taking the offensive had the desired effect, proving so disarming to the man that he was rendered momentarily dumb. Recovering himself, he would be off on a :itany of reasons why HKI & W and I could make a marriage: paid vacations, hospitalization, good working conditions, annual bonuses; while I, in what must have been an infuriating response, shook my head no, decidedly no, to every inducement save high salary, as though I considered them all totally irrelevant. “We’ll call you,” they’d say, extending their glad-hands. No doubt remembering our opening handshake, they would then red-facedly withdraw these hands. I would smile knowingly, as though I never for a moment doubted that indeed they’d call.
Did I really believe I’d get a job in this way? It would be easy for me to say that I didn’t, that for some perverse reason, masochism or a neurotic need to be rejected—a possibility to which I would later in my life give great weight—I was willfully acting in such a way as to alienate myself. But I doubt the validity of this. I had large faith—the faith of youth—in the city’s capacity to absorb me, hair-do and all; and it was only after summer was gone and autumn was casting long shadows that I began to take these rejections as personal affronts. It is very wearing to be honest, no matter how naïve or misreckoned that honesty is, and continue to be spurned for it. After a time it becomes numbing, like heavy, repeated blows to the face. I spent a lot of time that autumn on my aunt’s davenport, watching slow-legged, sexless women in soap operas drink coffee and weep into each other’s teatless bosoms while I spun the ever-increasingly detailed fantasy I called my future.
After a time I developed another outlet for my mounting fury, and it was this more than anything which prevented me from slipping over into that state the world seems so facilely prepared to pronounce psychotic. Each morning I found in the Times the most ludicrous advertisement and answered it. I always answered other advertisements, but it was only after I had answered the former that I could get on to those that might reasonably hold out hope of a job to me. Now these advertisements, the most puerile, were generally display advertisements and could be found anywhere from the classified to the sports to the financial sections:
This shop is looking for an intelligent, ambitious young man interested in becoming a copywriter—one who won’t wilt like a tired flower under a little sound, even harsh criticism, one who isn’t afraid of a hard knock or two, one who, in short, can roll with a punch and come out fighting. Write Box —.
Occasionally I spent an hour, even two, composing my replies, wanting them to be exactly right. It was only after they were completed, placed in an addressed envelope, and sealed that I was able to get on to answering those more reasonable advertisements.
Hard knocks? I used to have a boss who rapped me on the head just for kicks. He was a stupid bastard, though. From him I didn’t learn a thing, save that working for a stupid bastard is without profit—humiliating, loathsome, and utterly demoralizing. With you —and it is obvious from your advertisement that you are a man of high parts—it would be different. When you begin bouncing me off the ropes, just make sure I get the point. Okay? Then, after a time, I’ll be as knowledgeable and as flinty as you, and together of course we’ll live in your—shop, isn’t it?—as miserable sons-of-bitches forever after.
It was due to such an advertisement and the foregoing reply, or one not unlike it, that one day in late autumn I found myself in the presence of a man I will here call Cary Grant. When I received his letter asking me to stop by and see him, I thought my name had come to him from one of the placement agencies I was dealing with: I didn’t ordinarily sign my name to these letters, preferring to sign them Billy Earnest or Wilbur Straightshooter, giving my address as the Waldorf Towers or the Plaza. It was only when he handed me the letter and asked, “Did you write this?” that I realized that through some grievous mistake I had signed my own name. Even prior to this I had felt thoroughly intimidated by Mr. Grant. He looked not unlike that movie man, a tall, dark, and suavely graying man with an ocher complexion, the product no doubt of many hours spent in southern suns. He wore a royal-blue suit that didn’t so much fit as lie against him, a soft blue button-down shirt, and an expensive-looking and brilliantly shaded maroon-and-gold four-in-hand. On his feet—and he casually kept one foot on his huge, uncluttered mahogany desk throughout the interview—he wore black, grained shoes that appeared to weigh a
bout five pounds apiece; though I had never before been conscious of seeing a pair, I knew they were the goods: custom-made. He was, in brief, the kind of man who makes other men feel pale by comparison. It was a discomfort he was aware of arousing. Even before he said anything to me, he spent many moments looking me up and down, over and around, and all the time he smiled, as though I were striking in him some humorous chord and it was all he could do to restrain himself from laughter. It was a smile that had me trying to hide my scuffed-up shoes beneath my chair, brushing my bangs from my forehead, and staring uneasily at the deep, Chianti-colored carpeting. Then he handed me the letter and asked me about it. I read it over and over again, even in a groping and moronic way mouthing the words, as if I were actually having trouble appraising it as my handiwork. I was of course stalling, as I could not imagine—save for the worst: postal inspectors waiting in the wings to spirit me off for conveying obscene material through the mails—why in the world he had written me.
“Know why I sent for you?” he said finally, obviously cognizant of my bewilderment.
I smiled blankly. “No.”
“Because you remind me of myself twenty years ago. Arrogant. Snotty. Got a hard-on for the world.”
I smiled blankly. “Oh.”
He paused, obviously determining the best way to proceed. He smiled that unnerving smile: he had obviously hit on the best way. He told me that if I were Hemingway I should go to Paris, live on fried potatoes and ketchup, write The Great American Novel and have done with it; but that if I wanted to go into advertising—which I think even he conceded to be a rather absurd business—I should meet that world on its own terms. He, of course, didn’t care a good damn whether I went into the business or not. The truth of his words was having its
effect on me. The blood was hot, constant, and throbbing in my face; the room had begun to drift away beneath me: I was stony with shame. There was an agonizingly lengthy pause now. From the comments that followed, I determined t that he must have been judging how much of my appearance was attributable to indigence and how much to affectation, and that he settled the balance on the latter. “For Christ’s sake,” he said. “Look at those shoes. They haven’t been polished since you bought ‘em. And that goddam suit. Ever hear of a dry cleaner?” I didn’t do or say anything until he got to my hair, which, he said, might go just “swell down in the Village,” but would hardly inspire confidence in the Wild-root people. “It’s all part of the game, kid. Either play it by the: rules or forget about it.” —