Authors: Frederick Exley
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 dr
ank 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 openness. 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.
On the night of the tenth—the night before the
“
seizure
”
—I stayed late at the bar, drinking heavily and talking with B., a grieving young man of twenty. Having recently been rejected by a girl he loved, he was in a state near hyperesthesia. I don
’
t know why he chose to burden me with his lament. I did not know him well. In high school his brother and I had played football and basketball together; we had at the same time, or I would guess that we had, taken long aching looks at the same girls who were, in some celestial way, blossoming right before our eyes, so that we must once have been
“
almost friends.
”
But a few years before, when I was without a job, drinking and drifting, I had borrowed twenty dollars from that brother; and many months later, when I had attempted to repay him, he had steadfastly refused the money, saying,
“
If the tables had been reversed, buddy, I know you
’
d have helped me.
”
He had said this with a certain
“
style,
”
as though he were not trying to prove how well he was doing in business (and he was doing well); but
still
—we could, of course, never again be
“
almost friends.
”
Perhaps B. had heard his brother speak of me, and this coupled with my teacher image and the flecks of gray at my temples, led him to assume that I had answers, a conclusion that was not without its irony. In the inner pocket of my jacket was the letter from my wife—
”
until we are much more firmly settled on our separate roads
”
—and only moments before B. slithered up to me and said,
“
Jesus, Ex, I can
’
t eat or nothin
’
,
”
in an alcoholic fury I had telephoned long-distance to my wife and got my sister-in-law, who, refusing to call my wife to the phone, had prompted me to shout
“
Fuck you!
”
into the wire. All I had wanted to do was conform to the role—that of the drama
’
s villain—my sister-in-law had assigned to me; and after I had hung up the receiver, and until B. approached me, I had stood at the bar chuckling pensively at the thought of my sister-in-law
’
s hysterically indignant
I
-told-you-so
’
s
. Because I was unhappy I offered B. no easy consolation. While he kept saying,
“
Oh, Jesus, Ex
, Jesus H. Keeriiisst, don
’
t tell me that,
”
I told him the ordeal of my own first love, how it had taken me two years to alleviate the pain, how I had risen with it, gone to bed with it, and lived with it all my waking hours until, accepting its naturalness, it had begun to recede. Doubtless B. thought I was being cruel; and I really knew no way of convincing him otherwise. I told him I wished that when I was his age I had sought out some dismal creature for advice. Having gone to fat-assed,
“
successful
”
souls (making the American mistake of equating success with wisdom), I was glibly assured that
“
you
’
ll get over it
”
; and when I did not, I despised myself for what I deemed a flimsiness of heart. Seeing a younger version of myself in B.
’
s wild eyes, I offered him all I could.
“
Look, B., accept your pain as a part of life. There is, really, absolutely no consolation in telling you that I or any man has undergone the same thing. And then, how would I know I
’
ve suffered anywhere near what you
’
re going through? And not knowing that, isn
’
t any advice I give you presumptuous?
”
We drank together until closing time, one whisky after another, our heads bent close together. We talked through the velvety blue smoke, whispering about isolation and loss; with our sibilant voices we were trying to protect the privacy of our hearts from the ears all about us. Presently the lurid white lights, with almost a violent snap, caught us cheek-to-cheek and Freddy was shouting,
“
You don
’
t have to go home, gang —
but you can
’
t stay here
!
”
Reluctantly I rose, finished my drink, put on my raincoat, and walked to the door to wait. B. had moved quickly down the bar and was attempting to pick up a young, snub-nosed, and attractive girl who frequented the place. He picked her up, too; and I had to admire the ease with which he did it, speaking only a few words to her. He was a handsome, sensitive boy, and watching him so facilely
“
move
”
the girl I wondered what that other girl was searching for, the one who had tossed him over. The three of us left together. We drove around town for an hour or so nipping on B.
’
s bottle, then went to an all-night diner, The Red Moon. We had been looking for a girl friend of snub-nose
’
s, one who was, without my being consulted in the matter, supposed to be my date. We found her at The Red Moon. Before getting back into the car, I drew myself up, unzipped my fly, and stood in the middle of the street taking an enormous piss. A car tooted at me, swerved erratically, and just missed me. Speaking out of the corner of her mouth, my new date said,
“
Jeez, I ain
’
t going with that crazy bastard!
”
As she was going back into the diner to her leather-jacketed friends, she added,
“
Some schoolteacher!
”