Authors: Frederick Exley
In a fist fight that night I got badly beaten up. I could have avoided the fight, but the day
’
s events, coupled with the long years of my defeat, made me seek out a less subtle defeat. On arriving downtown, J. and I passed the time over a scarcely eaten meal of lasagna and sausage, drinking Chianti, and waiting for the morning newspapers. Though J. had business in Watertown in the morning, he lingered with me; and after a time—such was the blandness of our forced conversation—I began to suspect he was playing nursemaid to me, as though he were sure that once out of his protective view I would embark on something disastrous. By acting much too falsely cheerful I didn
’
t allay his suspicions. On the back pages of the
News
and
Mirror
the headlines proclaimed,
“
Gifford Out for Season,
”
and the articles on the inside said he would be hospitalized for two weeks with a severe concussion. Both stories implied his career was at an end. None of this was news to me: I had already guessed as much. What I hadn
’
t guessed at was the odd bellicosity Gifford would display at retiring. At a press conference the following spring he would tell the assembled reporters, speaking rather too pugnaciously, and pre facing his singular remark with that saw about football
’
s having been good to him, that his decision to retire was in no way predicated on the concussion. No one who saw that tackle could have doubted that it was the precise reason for his quit ting; or that, in some ways, it was inexorable. It was the rather brutal homage the league was paying him for catching one too many passes, for winning one too many games, for frustrating and disheartening the opponent one too many times; and I had no doubt that had it not been Bednarik, the next play, or the next game, or the next season, it would have been some other, perhaps more leonine, Bednarik. On reading his exasperating remark, I immediately rose, went out and bought a copy of every New York newspaper, returned, and read their accounts with equal diligence. Searching for the slightest nuance, I wanted to see if any of the reporters had greeted his remark with, if not outright laughter, a splattering of levity. Because none had, I assumed Gifford
’
s posture at the conference had been one of muscle-flexing aggressiveness. The re porters had faced him, or apparently they had, with a straight-faced and obliging solemnity. I understood perfectly. With a magnanimous gravity not unlike that of the reporters, people were at this time meeting my protestations that I could quit drinking any time I chose. Thus it was that at the end, or at what Gifford and I must have believed would be the end for him, it gave me some consolation that we were both addicted to something—he to football and I to liquor—capable of destroying us, if not actually, in humiliation and loss of pride.
For the first time since the beginning, when so many autumns before we had had the common ground of large hopes, we were, in our separate ways, coming round to the most terrible knowledge of all: we were dying. And that was the inescapable truth. Though I was some time in articulating it, in that limp and broken body against the green turf of the stadium, I had had a glimpse of my own mortality. As much as anything else, that fist fight was a futile rage against the inevitability of
that mortality.
After reading the papers J. and I went for a walk and ended standing on a corner of Times Square. We talked about nothing in particular until J., getting anxious about the time and the long drive ahead of him, became abruptly solicitous of me and asked whether I had the money for the train trip to Scars-dale. When I spoke, I looked directly at him.
“
I
’
ve got to have more money than that,
”
I said. With no sense of authority, he replied,
“
Go home, Ex. For Christ
’
s sake, go home.
”
To that I essayed a fitful and nauseating little jig. Resignedly removing his wallet from his pocket, J. took from it a ten-dollar bill and laid it in my eagerly outstretched hand. Turning quickly, and without saying good-bye, he walked away. Furious and pained, I stood for a moment watching the garish, meaningless lights of the square, listening to the shamed, embarrassed throbbings of my heart. When finally I turned back, wanting to call to him and shout my apologies, he was gone, lost among the strangers on the street.
Fifteen minutes later I was standing in the middle of Sheridan Square in the Village, staring up at a towering new apartment house of brick and stone. I walked to the curb and stared at the place where it had been. Now I walked backward to the middle of the square again, looked up, then to my right and to my left—seeking my bearings, making sure that I was indeed at Sheridan Square. I was. Louis
’
was not there. Trying to recapture a feeling of the future, and thinking that in that place, at least momentarily, I would be able to bear myself back into a time when there had been hope, I had come back to Louis
’
to drink draft beer. After J. had left without saying good-bye, in panic I had fled back to the past only to discover that even the building where Louis
’
had been was gone, and that another, a gaudy, whory-looking
m
onstrosity stood in its stead. The past was not there.
After several frantic inquiries in the neighborhood, I got the address of the new Louis
’
and went there. But it wasn
’
t the same, depressing me even more than Clarke
’
s had the day before. Where the old place, as one descended the steps, had seemed to rise up at one, a subterranean and enchanted place, a place of infinite promise, the new Louis
’
on Eighth Street was a long, narrow, characterless bar at street level. After drinking a beer or two, I had decided to go uptown and drink at one of the hotel bars near Grand Central when, looking up into the mirror, which was crossed with a wooden X, I saw on one side of the X my doleful, puffy face, and on the other, a young girl, sipping beer and weeping silently. Great, globule-like tears streaked effortlessly down her thin though pretty face. She was about nineteen. Her hair, which was brown and flecked with natural streaks of gold, and which must once have been lovely, was now lank with poor care; and when I turned, I saw that her arms were sticklike, as though they would break to the touch, and that her hands, which were beautiful in form, and delicate, were smudged with dirt. Conscious of the dirt, in an almost compulsive way she covered first her right hand with her left, and then her left with her right, as if she wanted to be a beatnik and then again did not, as if she did not have the gumption to play the role she had assumed for herself. Her breasts were much too big for the slenderness of her frame, and I was sure that in a very short
time she had lost a great deal of weight.
Two hours later she told me why. By this time I had gone through most of the ten dollars J. had given me, buying us both beers. In an effort to see her laugh I had been making
“
funnies.
”
When I finally succeeded, she took her laughter as an indication of our lifelong
pal
ship and to my dismay began telling her story. I say dismay because the story was like a million others in the Village, and she understood it no better than most. At the end of her sophomore year in an esteemed women
’
s college, she had persuaded her father to let her come for the summer to Washington Square and take some art courses, art being her interest. (She never for a moment understood that she came for the express purpose of being fucked.) She had been lonely for some days; but at the first party to which she was invited, she had met a big, brusque, sandaled, red-bearded poet who, within the first three hours of their meeting, had convinced her that her father was beyond absolution because he sold refrigerators, had read her poetry she didn
’
t comprehend, had got her sauced, had slapped her face, and had, or so she claimed, deflowered her, leaving her exhausted to fall asleep in her virginal blood. When she awoke, though, she was
“
in love, terribly so
”
; and during the past summer she and Big Red had been
“
deliriously happy.
”
(She meant that for the first time she was getting it on a bed on her back, trying to reach the ceiling with her ecstatically kicking legs.) As fall approached and it became time to return to school, she panicked and telephoned the refrigerator sales man. By cajolery and weeping, by threats against her own person, and finally by threatening to withdraw her filial affection from him, she persuaded Pop to let her remain and enroll in art school in Manhattan. This was a piece of jolly news which Big Red met by disappearing. At first she was bewildered, then heart-broken; and when, after he hadn
’
t shown up for a number of days, and by a minimum of checking—for Big Red was luridly indiscr
eet—she made inquiries, she dis
covered that the poet was quite contentedly married to a bleached blonde and the father of three freckled and red headed sons, all of whom, to the greater glory of poetry no doubt, were carried on the city
’
s relief rolls. On the night I talked with her, she had long since dropped out of her art courses; and for the past two months she had been going to three movies a day, weeping whether the picture was happy or sad, and living off popcorn and orange soda.
What the hell could I say? I understood Big Red, but not her—or rather, I understood her all too well. When she recovered, she would go home, marry a Yale man, and her life would be one long tale of self-deceit. I wanted to tell her to go home, to slap her face, to shake the shit out of her and insist that she go home. Instead, by way of an object lesson, I told her about my own early days in the Village and how all these years I had carried with me this memory of place only to discover that very day that that was what the Village was—a memory, a dream, a myth. Go home, I said, and forget it.
“
It doesn
’
t exist.
”
By three o
’
clock we had left Louis
’
and were walking south on Macdougal Street to her apartment, which she had told me was just south of Bleecker. Though it gives me no particular pride, as I walked I was debating whether to give her a fuck. The streets were deserted, but the moon was good and everything was clear. I to the inside, she to the curb, we were walking in silence. Suddenly understanding that, in the same way I understood her too well, she understood me not at all, in embarrassment I had stopped talking altogether. Presently two men came walking up the street toward us. Both were well-dressed, one a Negro, the other not. With their heads down, they walked rapidly, and talked, both at the same time and with that peculiar intensity which suggests the great world
’
s heartaches are all but put to rest. I heard the names Ayme and Kerouac and Edmund Wilson and Ginsberg and Pope and had to laugh, wondering by what juxtaposition of logic these names could so rapidly succeed one another in a conversation. On top of us they still had not seen us, and the white man bumped joltingly into the girl, scarcely nodded his head in apology or even interrupted his monologue, and proceeded blithely on his way. Then I did a foolish and impulsive thing, hardly knowing at the time why. I now know that I felt this girl, even if I didn
’
t like her, had been hard used enough—in the way my wife and sons had—by people like themselves, like Big Red, like me, people who brushed others into the gutter with no more thought than if they were dung. They re minded me of me, and I despised them for that. Turning, and with the girl tugging at ray arm and beseeching me not to bother, I called,
“
Hey, creep!
”
When they did not hear that, I made it,
“
Hey, nigger lover!
”
They heard that, freezing in mid-step, two silhouettes of rage against the Village night. And I laughed. And the fight was on.
We had words in which I insisted on an apology to the young lady, and in turn the white man insisted I reciprocate by withdrawing that vile appellation. But I couldn
’
t. In his voice was the hysterically cultivated outrage of the white liberal; and I loathed his patronizing what he unquestionably deemed my brutal and irremediable ignorance—I who under stood, or thought I did, more about the Negro and dignity and second-class citizenship than he would ever understand. Smiling to indicate my agreement to the childish bargain, I listened to his rather sullen apology to the girl, drew in a deep breath, and in the most despicable tone I could muster, said,
“
Now get your
faggoty
ass out of here!
”
It was a statement to which each reacted according to his character. The girl fled, running like hell, so that for a long time after I could hear in the clear November air the slap, slap of her sandals along Macdougal Street. Having removed his spectacles and trembling with rage, the white man was now being constrained by the Negro
’
s hand held laxly before his waist, the way a policeman constrains a child at a parade. When I looked into the Negro
’
s eyes, I saw that he was asking why? He had heard the terrifying, the unfathomable loathing in my voice; and as intelligent Negroes understand, he had sensed that that loathing had nothing to do with him or his people, that it rose up from deep disappointments within myself—from my own defeats and degradations and humiliations.
“
Why?
”
his eyes asked me; and because I knew the answer all too well, I said to the white man,
“
C
’
mon, nigger fucker!
”
He came at me very fast, running so rapidly and so furiously that I panicked. I was standing at the corner of a side street, Minetta Lane, and immediately started a wild back tracking into the lane, trying to think of a way to protect myself. In high school I had broken my arm and for many months had borne it in a thick cast, often thinking at the time what an exemplary weapon it would make. That is what I thought of now. Retreating as far as I could without tumbling backward, I abruptly stopped, set my legs wide apart, doubled my right arm at the elbow, and with all the strength in my body threw the arm even as he came rushing headlong on, catching him with my upper forearm flush in the nose. It was perfect. I felt so many things go in his face that I almost became sick. But still he fought. He hit me three or four times, hard, on the cheek and on the ear and on top of the head, by which time his blood was flowing profusely down the front of his white raincoat. Noticing it, he stopped as suddenly as if we had been rehearsing a movie scene. Bewildered and horrified, he felt his face with his hands. Then he sat down on the sidewalk, leaned against the side of Minetta
’
s Restaurant, and
began to whimper, still bewilderedly holding his face.