I attempted to be master of the situation: “Look—lookhere—” but my words came out in stammers. “I came up here —to—in good faith—”
“Oh, cut the whining!” he said. “You write me a letter like this”—and here he rattled the air violently with my letter—”and you expect me to treat you like a goddam prima donna! Brother!”
I was on my feet then, trembling. When I looked at him, I meant to ask, very evenly, “Just how fucking tough are you?” Bringing my eyes up to his with great and dramatic deliberation, I was right on the verge of speaking when he laughed; and I did, too, laughed easily and without self-consciousness. I laughed because in his laughter there was now neither cold detachment nor condescension, but the sense that we were sharing some grand joke: his laughter seemed as much directed at himself as at me. Together we roared, as people do who have carried a confrontation with each other to its distressingly uncomfortable limits and suddenly have safely passed those limits. For a moment I thought of resuming my seat. He was the first man I had met in New York who seemed neither diffident nor, quite frankly, dishonest. I liked him. But I was in those days much given to self-dramatization and believed that, once on my feet, I should leave lest he take my staying as a kind of submission and invitation to continue his abuse.
Later I was to recall that he asked, with something like concern, where and why I was going, but by then it was already too late. Before leaving I wanted to say something to him. He had so successfully intimidated me up to this point that it occurred to me he did not know the real sound of my voice. In college I had gone about with a brilliant, balding Boston-Irishman, Slattery, who was much given to a certain expression: “You’re some sack of potatoes, you are.” At the moment before turning and leaving, that is what I said to Grant. They were the weirdest words that ever issued from my mouth; the voice was not mine at all but my balding, Irish friend’s!
The next few days were among the longest and least comfortable of my life. No sooner had I reached the haven of my aunt’s couch than it occurred to me that Grant had been the city I had been seeking all along—the magnanimous city. What else, I reasoned, could he have done but hire me after subjecting me to such humiliation? Whether or not this was the case, in my mind I played out that interview over and over again, trying to inject into its slightest nuances the most preposterous import. I might be there yet, the scene having expanded itself into an O’Neill-like drama, had I not read in the newspapers that Steve Owen was being fired.
For months I hadn’t been able to read anything except advertisements. Sustaining my literary fantasy had required such fierce concentration that my energies were not in long enough supply for even cursory reading, but now, in boredom, I forced myself to read. Even then I did not at first understand what was happening to Owen. The newspapers kept using the euphemisms “retiring” and “resigning,” and it was only after I had gone to the columnists that I began to piece together the truth. When I did so, I was outraged. Owen had always maintained that defenses win football games, professional football was increasingly deferring to the forward pass as the ultimate and only weapon, and apparently Owen was being asked to step aside by men whose vision of the game proclaimed it unalterably given over to offensive techniques. These “men” were of course shadowy, never identified; but one had only to understand the childishly petulant character of the New York sportswriter (he takes every New York defeat as if he had been out there having his own face rubbed in the dirt) to know who the men were. Owen had been losing for a number of years now, and the writers had been on him. Victorious, there was something nauseatingly reprehensible in their doleful, sentimental invitations to the public to come to the Polo Grounds on Sunday to witness Owen’s swan song as head coach.
I would never have left the davenport that murderously damp Sunday had I not read that Frank Gifford was starting for the Giants at halfback. When I read that, my mind—as isolated minds are wont to do, offered the least stimulation—began to fabricate for itself a rather provocative little drama. I began to imagine how wonderful it would be if Gifford single-handedly devastated the Detroit Lions as a farewell present for Owen. I had had encounters with both of these men at different times in my life. In a way both had given me something, Gifford a lesson in how to live with one’s scars, and Owen no less than perhaps my first identity as a human being. And so that bleak, cold Sunday, I rose—to the astonishment of my aunt, I might add—from the davenport, bundled up as warmly as I could, took the commuting train to Grand Central, sought directions to the Polo Grounds, and got on the subway to the Bronx.
I met Steve Owen in the late thirties or early forties, when I was somewhere between the ages of eight and eleven. I suspect it was closer to the time I was eight, for I remember very little of what was said, remembering more the character of the meeting—that it was not an easy one. My father introduced me to him, or rather my father, when the atmosphere was most strained and the conversation had lagged, shoved me in front of Owen and said, “This is my son, Fred.”
“Are you tough?” Owen said.
“Pardon, sir?”
“Are you tough?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
Owen looked at my father. “Is he tough, Mr. Exley?” Though more than anything I wanted my father to say that I was, I was not surprised at his answer.
“It’s too soon to tell.”
Owen was surprised, though. He had great blondish-red eyebrows, which above his large rimless glasses gave him an astonished expression. Now he looked baffled. As the meeting had not been a comfortable one to begin with, he said in a tone that signaled the end of the conversation, “I’m sure he’s tough, Mr. Exley.” Turning abruptly on his heels, he walked across the lobby to the elevator of his hotel, where this meeting took place.
This was a few years after my father had quit playing football, when he was managing Watertown’s semiprofessional team, the Red and Black. A team which took on all challengers and invariably defeated them, they were so good that —stupefying as it seems—the ostensible reason for our journey to New York had been to discuss with Owen the possibility of the Red and Black’s playing in exhibition against the Giants. I say “stupefying” now; but that is retrospectively fake sophistication: I thought we could beat the Giants then, and I use the “we” with the glibness of one who was committed unalterably to the team’s fortunes—the water boy. On the wall in the bar of the Watertown Elks’ Club hangs a picture of that team; seated on the ground before the smiling, casual, and disinterested players is an anguishingly solemn boy—the solemnity attesting to the esteem in which I held my station. I can still remember with what pride I trotted, heavy water bucket and dry towels in hand, onto the field to minister to the combatants’ needs. Conversely, I recall the shame I experienced one day when, the team’s having fallen behind, the captain decided to adopt a spartan posture and deprive his charges of water, and he had ordered me back from the field, waving me off when I was almost upon the huddle. My ministrations denied in full view of the crowd, I had had to turn and trot, red-faced, back to the bench. Yes, I believed we could beat the Giants then. Long before Owen so adroitly put my father down, though, I had come to see that the idea of such a contest was not a good one.
The trip began on a depressing note. The night before we were to leave, my father got loaded and ran into a parked car, smashing in the front fenders of our Model A Ford roadster. It was one time—in retrospect—that my father’s drinking seems excusable. Such a journey in those days was one of near-epic proportions, made only at intervals of many years and at alarming sacrifices to the family budget; I have no doubt that that night my father was tremulous with apprehension, caught up in the spirit of bon voyage, and that he drank accordingly. Be that as it may, because he was drunk he left the scene of the accident; and the next day, fearing that the police might be searching for a damaged car, my mother wouldn’t let him take the Ford from the garage. For many hours it was uncertain whether we should make the trip at all; b
ut at the last moment, more, I think, because I had been promised the trip than for any other reason, it was decided we should go on the train.
We rode the whole night sitting up in the day coach, without speaking. My father was hung over, deeply ashamed, and there was a horrifying air of furtiveness hanging over us, as if we were fleeing some unspeakable crime. As a result, the trip—which might have been a fantastic adventure—never rose above this unhappy note. In New York we shared a room at the YMCA (I can remember believing that only the impossibly rich ever stayed in hotels), and the visit was a series of small, debilitating defeats: bland, soggy food eaten silently in barnlike automats; a room that varied arbitrarily between extreme heat and cold; a hundred and one missed subway connections; the Fordham-Pittsburgh game’s having been sold out; the astonishment I underwent at no one’s knowing my father; and finally, the fact that our meeting with Owen, which I had been led to believe was prearranged, was nothing more than wishful thinking on my father’s part.
I don’t know how many times we went to Owen’s hotel, but each time we were told that he was “out.” Each time we returned to the YMCA a little more tired, a little more defeated, and with each trip the Giant players whose names I knew, Strong and Cuff and Leemans and Hein, began to loom as large and forbidding as the skyscrapers. At one point I knew, though I daren’t say so to my father, that the idea of such a game was preposterous. Moreover, for the first time in my life I began to understand the awesome vanity and gnawing need required to take on New York City with a view to imposing one’s personality on the place. This was a knowledge that came to haunt me in later years.
It was not until my father, his voice weary, suggested that we make one final trip to the hotel that I saw that he, too, was disheartened. All the way there I prayed that Owen would still be “out.” I had come to see that the meeting was undesired by him, and I feared the consequences of our imposition. The moment we walked into the lobby, however, the desk clerk (who had, I’m sure, come to feel sorry for us) began furiously stabbing the air in the direction of a gruff-looking, bespectacled, and stout man rolling, seaman-like, in the direction of the elevator—a fury that could only have signaled that it was he, Owen. My father moved quickly across the lobby, stopped him, and began the conversation that ended with Owen’s I’m sure he’s tough, Mr. Exley. As I say, I don’t remember a good deal of the conversation prior to my being introduced; I do remember that Owen, too, thought the idea of such a contest ridiculous. Worse than that, my father had already been told as much by mail, and I think that his having made the trip in the face of such a refusal struck Owen as rather nervy, accounting for the uneasiness of the meeting. On Owen’s leaving, I did not dare look at my father. It wasn’t so much that I had ever lived in fear of him as that I had never before seen any man put him down, and I was not prepared to test his reaction to a humiliation which I had unwittingly caused. Moreover, my father’s shadow was so imposing that I had scarcely ever, until that moment, had any identity of my own. At the same time I had yearned to emulate and become my father, I had also longed for his destruction. Steve Owen not only gave me identity; he proved to me my father was vulnerable.
On the subway going up to the Polo Grounds, I was remembering that meeting and contemplating the heavy uneasiness of it all anew when suddenly, feeling myself inordinately cramped, I looked up out of my reverie to discover that the car was jammed and that I had somehow got smack among the members of a single family—an astonishing family, a family so incredible that for the first time in my life I considered the possibility of Norman Rockwell’s not being lunatic. They were a father, a mother, a girl about fifteen, and a boy one or two years younger than she. All were dressed in expensive-looking camel’s-hair coats; each carried an item that designated him a fan—the father two soft and brilliantly plaid wool blankets, the mother a picnic basket, the girl a half-gallon thermos, and the boy a pair of field glasses, strung casually about his neck—each apparently doing his bit to make the day a grand success. What astonished me, though, was the almost hilarious similarity of their physical appearance: each had brilliant auburn hair; each had even, startlingly white teeth, smilingly exposed beneath attractive snub noses; and each of their faces was liberally sprinkled with great, outsized freckles. The total face they presented was one of overwhelming and wholesome handsomeness. My first impulse was to laugh. Had I not felt an extreme discomfort caused by the relish they took in each other’s being—their looks seemed to smother each other in love—and the crowdedness that had caused me to find myself wedged among them, separating them, I might have laughed. I felt not unlike a man who eats too fast, drinks too much, occasionally neglects his teeth and fingernails, is given to a pensive scratching of his vital parts, lets rip with a not infrequent fart, and wakes up one morning to find himself smack in the middle of a Saturday Evening Post cover, carving the goddam Thanksgiving turkey for a family he has never seen before. What was worse, they were aware of my discomfort; between basking in each other’s loveliness they would smile apologetically at me, as though in crowding about me they were aware of having aroused me from my reverie and were sorry for it. Distressed, I felt I ought to say something—”I’m sorry I’m alive” or something—so I said the first thing that came to my mind. It was a lie occasioned by my reverie, one which must have sounded very stupid indeed.
“I know Steve Owen,” I said.
“Really!” they all chimed in high and good-natured unison. For some reason I got the impression that they had not the foggiest notion of what I had said. We all fell immediately to beaming at each other and nodding deferentially—a posture that exasperated me to the point where I thought I must absolutely say something else. Hoping that I could strike some chord in them that would relieve the self-consciousness we all were so evidently feeling, I spoke again.
“I know Frank Gifford, too.”
“Really!” came their unabashed reply. Their tone seemed so calculated to humor me that I was almost certain they were larking with me. Staring at them, I couldn’t be sure; and we all fell back to smiling idiotically and nodding at each other. We did this all the way to the Bronx where, disembarking, I lost contact with them—for the moment at least—and felt much relieved.
It seems amazing to me now that while at USC, where Gifford and I were contemporaries, I never saw him play football; that I had to come three thousand miles from the low, white, smog-enshrouded sun that hung perpetually over the Los Angeles Coliseum to the cold, damp, and dismal Polo Grounds to see him perform for the first time; and that I might never have had the urge that long-ago Sunday had I not once on campus had a strange, unnerving confrontation with him.
The confrontation was caused by a girl, though at the time of the encounter I did not understand what girl. I had transferred from Hobart College, a small, undistinguished liberal arts college in Geneva, New York, where I was a pre-dental student, to USC, a large, undistinguished university in Los Angeles, where I became an English major. The transition was not unnatural. I went out there because I had been rejected by a girl, my first love, whom I loved beyond the redeeming force of anything save time. Accepting the theory of distance as time, I put as much of it between the girl and myself as I could. Once there, though, the prospect of spending my days gouging at people’s teeth and whiffing the intense, acidic odor of decay—a profession I had chosen with no stronger motive than keeping that very girl in swimming suits and tennis shorts: she had (and this, sadly, is the precise extent of my memory of her) the most breath-taking legs I had ever seen—seemed hideous, and I quite naturally became an English major with a view to reading The Books, The Novels and The Poems, those pat reassurances that other men had experienced rejection and pain and loss. Moreover, I accepted the myth of California the Benevolent and believed that beneath her warm skies I would find surcease from my pain in the person of some lithe, fresh-skinned, and incredibly lovely blond coed. Bearing my rejection like a disease, and like a man with a frightfully repugnant and contagious lep
rosy, I was unable to attract anything as healthy as the girl I had in mind.
Whenever I think of the man I was in those days, cutting across the neat-cropped grass of the campus, burdened down by the weight of the books in which I sought the consolation of other men’s grief, and burdened further by the large weight of my own bitterness, the whole vision seems a nightmare. There were girls all about me, so near and yet so out of reach, a pastel nightmare of honey-blond, pink-lipped, golden-legged, lemon-sweatered girls. And always in this horror, this gaggle of femininity, there comes the vision of another girl, now only a little less featureless than all the rest. I saw her first on one stunning spring day when the smog had momentarily lifted, and all the world seemed hard bright blue and green. She came across the campus straight at me, and though I had her in the range of my vision for perhaps a hundred feet, I was only able, for the fury of my heart, to give her five or six frantic glances. She had the kind of comeliness—soft, shoulder-length chestnut hair; a sharp beauty mark right at her sensual mouth; and a figure that was like a swift, unexpected blow to the diaphragm—that to linger on makes the beholder feel obscene. I wanted to look. I couldn’t look. I had to look. I could give her only the most gaspingly quick glances. Then she was by me. Waiting as long as I dared, I turned and she was gone.